Texture and color segmentation based on the combined use of the structure tensor and the image components

In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation scheme for textured gray-level and color images based on the combined use of the local structure tensor and the original image components. The structure tensor is a well-established tool for image segmentation and has been successfully employed for unsupervised segmentation of textured gray-level and color images. The original image components can also provide very useful information. Therefore, a combined segmentation approach has been designed that combines both elements within a common energy minimization framework. Besides, an original method is proposed to dynamically adapt the relative weight of these two pieces of information. Quantitative experimental results on a large number of gray-level and color images show the improved performance of the proposed approach, in comparison to several related approaches in recent studies. Experiments have also been carried out on real world images in order to validate the proposed method. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.