Wavelet adaptive quantization based color image segmentation

Image segmentation is an important pre-processing step towards higher level tasks such as object recognition, computer vision or image compression. Most of the existing segmentation algorithms deal with grayscale images only. But in the modern world, color images are extensively used in many situations. A new approach for color image segmentation is presented in this paper. There are many ways to deal with image segmentation problem and in these techniques; a particular class of algorithms traces their origin from region-based methods. These algorithms group homogeneous pixels, which are connected to primitive regions. They are easy to implement and are promising. Therefore, here one of the most efficient region-based segmentation algorithms is explained. The color image is quantized adaptively, using a wavelet transform. Then the region growing process is adopted. As preprocess, before actual region merging, small regions are eliminated by merging them with neighbor regions depending upon color similarity. After this, homogeneous regions are merged to get segmented output.