SEGMENTATION BY TEXTURE USING A CO-OCCURRENCE MATRIX AND A SPLIT-AND-MERGE ALGORITHM

The co-occurrence matrix is used for segmentation according to texture. It is first evaluated on a set of regions forming two levels of the quadratic picture tree (or pyramid). If the matrices of a region and its four children in the tree are similar then that region is considered to be of uniform texture. If not it is replaced by its children. In this way the split-and-merge algorithm is used to achieve a preliminary segmentation. It is followed by a grouping algorithm using the co-occurrence matrix and the region adjacency graph, plus a small region elimination step in which regions are grouped according to their gray level because texture cannot be defined reliably on very small regions. Examples of implementation on two 256 × 256 pictures are included. © 1979.