A fast and fully distributed method for region-based image segmentation

Distributed and parallel computing techniques allow fast image processing, namely when these techniques are applied at the low and the medium level of a vision system. In this paper, a collective and distributed method for image segmentation is introduced and evaluated. The method is modeled as a multi-agent system, where the agents aim to collectively produce a region-based segmentation. Each agent starts searching for an acceptable region seed by randomly jumping within the image. Next, it performs a region growing around its position. Thus, several agents find themselves within the same homogeneous region and are organized in a graph where two agents are connected if they are within the same region. So, a unifying of the labels in a same region is collaboratively performed by the agents themselves. The proposed method was experimented on real range images from the ABW dataset and the Object Segmentation Database (OSD) one, and the obtained results were compared to those of some well-referenced methods from the literature. The evaluation results show that the proposed method provides fast and accurate image segmentation, allowing it to be deployed for real-time vision systems.