Texture gradient based watershed segmentation

The watershed transform is a well established tool for the segmentation of images. However, watershed segmentation is often not effective for textured regions that are perceptually homogeneous. Such regions are usually inaccurately over-segmented with no reference to any texture changes. We now introduce a novel concept of “texture gradient” implemented using a non-decimated complex wavelet transform. A novel marker location algorithm is subsequently used to locate significant homogeneous textured or non textured regions. A marker driven watershed transform is then used to properly segment the identified regions. The combined algorithm produces effective texture and intensity based segmentation for the application to content based retrieval of images.