Uncommitted Morphological Merging of Watershed Segments

Over the past decades, watershed segmentation has gained much popularity due to its attractive properties: closer to what a human observer would decide, efficient implementation and elegant combination of edge- and region-based segmentation. Nevertheless, it is often associated with the problem of over-segmentation owing to its high sensitivity to variation in intensity. Various merging algorithms have been proposed to tackle this problem, but most of them are either user-dependent, knowledge-based, or computationally expensive. This paper presents a novel merging algorithm, which is automatic, uncommitted and yet computationally cheap. The algorithm is proposed based on a careful analysis of the roots of the spurious segments and on a morphological processing of the root