Robust Color Image Segmentation through Tensor Voting

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for robust color image segmentation based on tensor voting, a robust perceptual grouping technique used to extract salient information from noisy data. First, an adaptation of tensor voting to both image denoising and robust edge detection is applied. Second, pixels in the filtered image are classified into likely-homogeneous and likely-inhomogeneous by means of the edginess maps generated in the first step. Third, the likely-homosgeneous pixels are segmented through an efficient graph-based segmenter. Finally, a modified version of the same graph-based segmenter is applied to the likely-inhomogeneous pixels in order to obtain the final segmentation. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance than the state-of-the-art.