Texture Segmentation by Contractive Decomposition and Planar Grouping

Image segmentation has long been an important problem in the computer vision community. In our recent work we have addressed the problem of texture segmentation, where we combined top-down and bottom-up views of the image into a unified procedure. In this paper we extend our work by proposing a modified procedure which makes use of graphs of image regions. In the top-down procedure a quadtree of image region descriptors is obtained in which a novel affine contractive transformation based on neighboring regions is used to update descriptors and determine stable segments. In the bottom-up procedure we form a planar graph on the resulting stable segments, where edges are present between vertices representing neighboring image regions. We then use a vertex merging technique to obtain the final segmentation. We verify the effectiveness of this procedure by demonstrating results which compare well to other recent techniques.