Unsupervised image segmentation combining region and boundary

An integrated approach to image segmentation is presented that combines region and boundary information using maximum a posteriori estimation and decision theory. The algorithm employs iterative, decision-directed estimation performed on a novel multi-resolution representation. The use of a multi-resolution technique ensures both robustness in noise and efficiency of computation, while the model-based estimation and decision process is flexible and spatially local, thus avoiding assumptions about global homogeneity or size and number of regions. A comparative evaluation of the method against region-only and boundary-only methods is presented and is shown to produce accurate segmentations at quite low signal-to-noise ratios. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.