Foundatlon, Lexlngton, KY (Us) 2001; this document Was available on-line for viewing on Dec. 4, 2001 and printed on that date. This document identi?ed Attachment (*) Notice: Subject to any disclaimer, the term of this D of prov. app. patent is extended or adjusted under 35 C .
We consider the problem of image segmentation and describe an algorithm that is based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, is fast, is applicable to multi-band images, and guarantees closed regions. We construct an objective €unction that, when minimized, yields a partitioning of the image into regions where the pixel values in each band of each region are described by a polynomial surface plus noise. The polynomial orders and their coefficients are determined by the algorithm. The minimization is difficult because (1) it involves a search over a very large space and (2) there is extensive computation required at each stage of the search. To address the first of these problems we use a region-merging minimization algorithm. To address the second we use an incremental polynomial regression that uses computations from the previous stage to compute results in the current stage, resulting in a significant speed up over the non-incremental technique. The segmentation result obtained is suboptimal in general but of high quality. Results on real images are shown.
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