Multi-resolution image segmentation based on Gaussian mixture model

1. INTRODUCTION Image segmentation, which groups an image’s pixels into some homogeneous regions with respect to one or more characteristics such as gray-level, color and texture, is a basic and challenging problem in image processing. Many researchers have devoted their efforts to this problem and many segmentation algorithms have been proposed[1], histogram based thresholding algorithm, edge detection method and region growing and merging method for instance. Gaussian mixture model bas…

Multi-resolution image segmentation based on Gaussian mixture model

Mixture model based image segmentation method, which assumes that image pixels are independent and do not consider the position relationship between pixels, is not robust to noise and usually leads to misclassification. A new segmentation method, called multi-resolution Gaussian mixture model method, is proposed. First, an image pyramid is constructed and son-father link relationship is built between each level of pyramid. Then the mixture model segmentation method is applied to the top level. The segmentation result on the top level is passed top-down to the bottom level according to the son-father link relationship between levels. The proposed method considers not only local but also global information of image, it overcomes the effect of noise and can obtain better segmentation result. Experimental result demonstrates its effectiveness.