Hierarchical Image Segmentation Using a Combined Geometrical and Feature Based Approach

This paper presents a fully automatic segmentation algorithm based on geometrical and local attributes of color images. This method incorporates a hierarchical assessment scheme into any general segmentation algorithm for which the segmentation sensitivity can be changed through parameters. The parameters are varied to create different segmentation levels in the hierarchy. The algorithm examines the consistency of segments based on local features and their relationships with each other, and selects segments at different levels to generate a final segmentation. This adaptive parameter variation scheme provides an automatic way to set segmentation sensitivity parameters locally according to each region's characteristics instead of the entire image. The algorithm does not require any training dataset. The geometrical attributes can be defined by a shape prior for specific applications, i.e. targeting objects of interest, or by one or more general constraint(s) such as boundaries between regions for non-specific applications. Using mean shift as the general segmentation algorithm, we show that our hierarchical approach generates segments that satisfy geometrical properties while conforming with local properties. In the case of using a shape prior, the algorithm can cope with partial occlusions. Evaluation is carried out on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset and Benchmark (BSDS300) (general natural images) and on geo-spatial images (with specific shapes of interest). The F-measure for our proposed algorithm, i.e. the harmonic mean between precision and recall rates, is 64.2% on BSDS300, outperforming the same segmentation algorithm in its standard non-hierarchical variant.