The use of visible color difference in the quantitative evaluation of color image segmentation

In this paper, we propose the use of visible color difference in a new quantitative evaluation scheme for color image segmentation. With visible color difference, two measurements, named intra-region visual error and inter-region visual error, are defined to evaluate the quality of segmentation results. To fit human visual perception, segmentation results with an excessive amount of intra-region error are regarded as under-segmentation, while segmentation results with too many inter-region errors are regarded as over-segmentation. Based on these two measurements, a complete scheme for the evaluation of color image segmentation is proposed. The simulation results demonstrate that this new scheme may provide a reliable and efficient way to automatically select the parameter settings for a given segmentation algorithm and to compare the performance between various segmentation algorithms.