Filtering in the segmentation space

In this paper, we introduce a method aimed at improving the segmentation results obtained with complex natural images. It is based on the integration of a set of image segmentation maps. This technique allows the redundancy between some primary segmentations to be extracted. Our approach is mainly region-oriented. It is based on a fuzzy description of the segmentation by means of a mechanism associating regions of different maps. Introducing a dissimilarity measurement allows a so-called segmentation filtering to be performed. This approach turns out to be very efficient in the case of natural complex images. It can be regarded as an extension of nonlinear filtering techniques