Segmentation and contour closing of textured and non-textured images using distances between textures

Contour closing is an important step in image segmentation., especially after contour extraction. Problems appear when the image is composed of a mixture of textured and non-textured areas. The method we present in this paper tries to take the best of two segmentation approaches: a high resolution edge detector, and a texture measure to decide whether to suppress the portion of edge or to keep it and prolong it. The method is composed of two steps, both of them exploiting distances between textures. The first step erases false contours in textured areas. The second step closes the remaining contours