Multiscale color-texture image segmentation with adaptive region merging

A novel multiscale image segmentation algorithm is presented, which is based on the dominant color and homogeneous texture features (HTF) that are adopted in the MPEG-7 standard. These features are efficiently combined to perform the automatic segmentation. First, the image is roughly segmented into textured and nontextured regions using Gabor decomposition. A multiscale segmentation is then applied to the resulting regions, according to the local texture feature. Finally, a precise boundary refinement procedure is employed to accurately determine the boundaries between textured and nontextured regions. A novel region merging algorithm is introduced with a simple and effective segment classification by using HTF to deal with the over-segmentation problem. Experiments show that our algorithm provides an improved performance compared with JSEG and a watershed algorithm.