Watershed framework to region-based image segmentation

This paper proposes a new framework to image segmentation which combines edge- and region-based information with spectral techniques through the morphological algorithm of watersheds. A pre-processing step is used to reduce the spatial resolution without losing important image information. An initial partitioning of the image into primitive regions is set by applying a rainfalling watershed algorithm on the image gradient magnitude. This initial partition is the input to a computationally efficient region segmentation process which produces the final segmentation. The latter process uses a region-based similarity graph representation of the image regions. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to produce simpler segmentations and to compare favourably with state-of-the-art methods.