Constrained Markov Random Field Model for Color and Texture Image Segmentation

In this paper, the problem of color image segmentation is addressed as a pixel labeling problem. The observed color image is assumed to be the degraded version of the image labels. We have proposed a new Markov random field (MRF) model known as constrained MRF (CMRF) model to model the unknown image labels and Ohta (I₁I₂I₃) model is used as the color model. The unique feature of the proposed CMRF model is found to posses a unifying feature of modeling scene and texture images as well. The labels are estimated using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation criterion. A hybrid algorithm is proposed to obtain the MAP estimate and the performance of the algorithm is found to be better than that of using simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. The performance of the proposed model is compared with JSEG method and the proposed model is found to be better than JSEG method.