This paper provides an algorithm for partitioning grayscale images into disjoint regions of coherent brightness and texture. Natural images contain both textured and untextured regions, so the cues of contour and texture differences are exploited simultaneously. Contours are treated in the intervening contour framework, while texture is analyzed using textons. Each of these cues has a domain of applicability, so to facilitate cue combination we introduce a gating operator based on the texturedness of the neighborhood at a pixel. Having obtained a local measure of how likely two nearby pixels are to belong to the same region, we use the spectral graph theoretic framework of normalized cuts to find partitions of the image into regions of coherent texture and brightness. Experimental results on a wide range of images are shown.

A new boundary detection approach for shape modeling is presented. It detects the global minimum of an active contour model’s energy between two end points. Initialization is made easier and the curve is not trapped at a local minimum by spurious edges. We modify the “snake” energy by including the internal regularization term in the external potential term. Our method is based on finding a path of minimal length in a Riemannian metric. We then make use of a new efficient numerical method to find this shortest path. It is shown that the proposed energy, though based only on a potential integrated along the curve, imposes a regularization effect like snakes. We explore the relation between the maximum curvature along the resulting contour and the potential generated from the image. The method is capable to close contours, given only one point on the objects’ boundary by using a topology-based saddle search routine. We show examples of our method applied to real aerial and medical images.

easurement error distributions is dependent on the type of geometric feature, the measurement noise model and the nature of the unknown scene-to-model transformation: some examples are presented. A number of variations on the basic labelling algorithm are described, of which some have implications for real-time applications. The algorithm can also be readily implementated on several different types of parallel-processing computers. Key words: Matching, Labelling, Probabilistic Relaxation, Object Recognition. Email: w.christmas@ee.surrey.ac.uk WWW: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Josef Kittler and Maria Petrou, for their guidance and stimulating discussions during the course of this work, and for providing the ideas and motivation that led to the work in the first place. I would also like to thank my other colleagues in the VSSP Group, for their interest and discussions. In particular thanks are due to Ge

Many computer vision problems can be considered to consist of two main tasks: the extraction of image content descriptions and their subsequent matching. The appropriate choice of type and level of description is of course task dependent, yet it is generally accepted that the low-level or so called early vision layers in the Human Visual System are context independent. This paper concentrates on the use of low-level approaches for solving computer vision problems and discusses three inter-related aspects of this: saliency; scale selection and content description. In contrast to many previous approaches which separate these tasks, we argue that these three aspects are intrinsically related. Based on this observation, a multiscale algorithm for the selection of salient regions of an image is introduced and its application to matching type problems such as tracking, object recognition and image retrieval is demonstrated.

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We study image segmentation on the basis of locally excitatory globally inhibitory oscillator networks (LEGION), whereby the phases of oscillators encode the binding of pixels. We introduce a potential for each oscillator so that only those oscillators with strong connections from their neighborhood can develop high potentials. Based on the concept of potential, a solution to remove noisy regions in an image is proposed for LEGION, so that it suppresses the oscillators corresponding to noisy regions, without affecting those corresponding to major regions. We show analytically that the resulting oscillator network separates an image into several major regions, plus a background consisting of all noisy regions, and illustrate network properties by computer simulation. The network exhibits a natural capacity in segmenting images. The oscillatory dynamics leads to a computer algorithm, which is applied successfully to segmenting real graylevel images. A number of issues regarding biological plausibility and perceptual organization are discussed. We argue that LEGION provides a novel and effective framework for image segmentation and figure-ground segregation. DeLiang Wang and David Terman Image Segmentation 1.

Abstract. We describe a new form of energy functional for the modelling and identification of regions in images. The energy is defined on the space of boundaries in the image domain, and can incorporate very general combinations of modelling information both from the boundary (intensity gradients,...), and from the interior of the region (texture, homogeneity,. We describe two polynomial-time digraph algorithms for finding the global minima of this energy. One of the algorithms is completely general, minimizing the functional for any choice of modelling information. It runs in a few seconds on a 256 × 256 image. The other algorithm applies to a subclass of functionals, but has the advantage of being extremely parallelizable. Neither algorithm requires initialization. 1.

This paper presents a generic method for perceptual grouping, and an analysis of its expected grouping quality. The grouping method is fairly general: it may be used for the grouping of various types of data features, and to incorporate different grouping cues, operating over feature sets of different sizes. The proposed method is divided into two parts: Constructing a graph representation of the available perceptual grouping evidence, and then finding the "best" partition of the graph into groups. The first stage includes a cue enhancement procedure, which integrates the information available from multi-feature cues into very reliable bi-feature cues. Both stages are implemented using known statistical tools such as Wald's SPRT algorithm and the Maximum Likelihood criterion. The accompanying theoretical analysis of this grouping criterion quantifies intuitive expectations and predicts that the expected grouping quality increases with cue reliability. It also shows that investing more computational effort in the grouping algorithm leads to better grouping results. This analysis, which quantifies the grouping power of the Maximum Likelihood criterion, is independent of the grouping domain. To our best knowledge, such an analysis of a grouping process is given here for the first time. Three grouping algorithms, in three different domains, are synthesized as instances of the generic method, They demonstrate the applicability and generality of this grouping method. Keywords : Perceptual Grouping, Grouping Analysis, Graph Clustering, Maximum Likelihood, Wald's SPRT, Performance Prediction, Generic Grouping Algorithm. 1

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We describe a model based recognition system, called LEWIS, for the identification of planar objects based on a projectively invariant representation of shape. The advantages of this shape description include simple model acquisition (direct from images), no need for camera calibration or object pose computation, and the use of index functions. We describe the feature construction and recognition algorithms in detail and provide an analysis of the combinatorial advantages of using index functions. Index functions are used to select models from a model base and are constructed from projective invariants based on algebraic curves and a canonical projective coordinate frame. Examples are given of object recognition from images of real scenes, with extensive object libraries. Successful recognition is demonstrated despite partial occlusion by unmodelled objects, and realistic lighting conditions. 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview In the context of this paper, recognition is defined as the prob...