Color image segmentation using histogram multithresholding and fusion

A novel method for multiband image segmentation has been proposed. The method is based on segmentation of subsets of bands using multithresholding followed by the fusion of the resulting segmentation "channels". For color images the band subsets are chosen as the RB. RG and BG pairs, whose two-dimensional histograms are processed via a peak-picking algorithm to effect multithresholding. The segmentation maps are first fused by running a label concordance algorithm and then smoothed by a spatial-chromatic majority filter. It is shown that for multiband images, multithresholding subsets of bands followed by a fusion stage results in improved performance and running time. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.