Multiscale methods for the segmentation of images

This work presents a method for segmenting images based on gradients in the intensity function. Past approaches have centered on formulating the problem in the context of variational calculus as the minimization of a functional involving the image intensity and edge functions. Computational methods for finding the minima of such variational problems are prone to two shortfalls: they are often computationally intensive and almost always incapable of computing error statistics associated with the segmentation. Using a particular variational formulation as a starting point, this paper presents a derivation of an associated statistical formulation using multiscale models. The result is an algorithm which is fast and capable of computing error statistics