Unsupervised texture segmentation using Gabor filters

This paper presents a texture segmentation algorithm inspired by the multi-channel filtering theory for visual information processing in the early stages of human visual system. The channels are characterized by a bank of Gabor filters that nearly uniformly covers the spatial-frequency domain, and a systematic filter selection scheme is proposed, which is based on reconstruction of the input image from the filtered images. Texture features are obtained by subjecting each (selected) filtered image to a nonlinear transformation and computing a measure of “energy” in a window around each pixel. A square-error clustering algorithm is then used to integrate the feature images and produce a segmentation. A simple procedure to incorporate spatial information in the clustering process is proposed. A relative index is used to estimate the “true” number of texture categories.     

Unsupervised texture segmentation using Markov random field models

The problem of unsupervised segmentation of textured images is considered. The only explicit assumption made is that the intensity data can be modeled by a Gauss Markov random field (GMRF). The image is divided into a number of nonoverlapping regions and the GMRF parameters are computed from each of these regions. A simple clustering method is used to merge these regions. The parameters of the model estimated from the clustered segments are then used in two different schemes, one being all approximation to the maximum a posterior estimate of the labels and the other minimizing the percentage misclassification error. The proposed approach is contrasted with the algorithm of S. Lakshamanan and H. Derin (1989), which uses a simultaneous parameter estimation and segmentation scheme. The results of the adaptive segmentation algorithm of Lakshamanan and Derin are compared with a simple nearest-neighbor classification scheme to show that if enough information is available, simple techniques could be used as alternatives to computationally expensive schemes     

一种基于小波变换的无监督纹理分割算法

提出了一种基于小波变换和均值偏移的无监督纹理图像分割算法。首先用小波变换对图像进行二级小波分解,然后用均值偏移算法估计出粗尺度上对应的聚类数目,并结合模糊c均值算法进行聚类,在此基础上,用定义的阈值函数和Fisher判据确定出细尺度上每个初始聚类中心的一个同组,从而实现图像的由粗到细的分割。实验结果表明,在分割精度相差不大的情况下,该方法解决了传统聚类方法所存在的需要聚类数目和对初始聚类中心敏感问题。     

多分辨模型下的无监督统计纹理分割算法

针对基于统计的纹理分割算法存在的不足,提出了一种新的多分辨模型下的无监督统计纹理分割算法。该算法分层次对纹理图像进行动态分割,有效地利用了不同分辨率上最能表述某一纹理特性的统计特征,然后结合纹理的结构信息对边缘区域进行边界提取,进而得到较准确的纹理分割图。实验证明了这种区域与边界相结合的算法对纹理图像的分割具有高效、准确、通用性强的特点。     

基于第2代Curvelet的非监督式纹理缺陷分割

针对纹理缺陷分割问题,将曲波变换与均值漂移理论相结合,形成有效的纹理分割新方法。首先,通过曲波变换将图像分解到各通道,对各通道的图像进行非线性变换得到特征图像;然后,用均值漂移算法对各通道特征图像进行自适应聚类,找到各通道的奇异点;最后,对所有通道滤波后的图像进行重构,使缺陷凸显并通过阈值法二值化。该方法不需要学习样本,可以快速、精确地定位到多目标物边界,对旋转、亮度变化、噪声、弱边界具有很强的鲁棒性。通过MATLAB进行仿真实验,验证了该方法的有效性。     

Dynamic texture segmentation based on deterministic partially self-avoiding walks

Recently there has been a considerable interest in dynamic textures due to the explosive growth of multimedia databases. In addition, dynamic texture appears in a wide range of videos, which makes it very important in applications concerning to model physical phenomena. Thus, dynamic textures have emerged as a new field of investigation that extends the static or spatial textures to the spatio-temporal domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic texture segmentation based on automata theory and k-means algorithm. In this approach, a feature vector is extracted for each pixel by applying deterministic partially self-avoiding walks on three orthogonal planes of the video. Then, these feature vectors are clustered by the well-known k-means algorithm. Although the k-means algorithm has shown interesting results, it only ensures its convergence to a local minimum, which affects the final result of segmentation. In order to overcome this drawback, we compare six methods of initialization of the k-means. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art segmentation methods.     

基于分形与灰度特征的无监督纹理分割技术

提出了一种新的基于方向分形特征和灰度特征的纹理图像分割方法。该方法首先用一个局部窗从功率谱图像中提取不同方向上的分形维和分形截距,将它们各自的均值和方差与灰度均值、灰度方差结合起来构成一个多维特征向量,然后利用模糊C均值聚类算法进行聚类实现纹理图像的分割。实验结果表明该方法对织物纹理图像和医学图像都有着良好的分割效果,鲁棒性强。     

结合半局部信息与结构张量的无监督纹理图像分割

针对纹理的半局部性质与方向性,提出一种基于活动轮廓的无监督双纹理图像分割方法。首先分析基于半局部信息的纹理特征表示方法,指出其不能有效区分纹理的方向特征。然后利用半局部信息结合非线性结构张量构造4通道纹理特征,采用混合高斯模型作为纹理特征的概率密度函数,模型的数值求解采用分裂Bregman方法。新方法充分考虑纹理结构的周期性与方向特性,实验结果表明,其能够处理复杂的双纹理图像分割任务,同时具有高效与无监督特性。     

Dynamic texture analysis and segmentation using deterministic partially self-avoiding walks

Dynamic texture is a recent field of investigation that has received growing attention from computer vision community in the last years. These patterns are moving texture in which the concept of self-similarity for static textures is extended to the spatiotemporal domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic texture representation, that can be used for both texture analysis and segmentation. In this method, deterministic partially self-avoiding walks are performed in three orthogonal planes of the video in order to combine appearance and motion features. We validate our method on three applications of dynamic texture that present interesting challenges: recognition, clustering and segmentation. Experimental results on these applications indicate that the proposed method improves the dynamic texture representation compared to the state of the art.     

Unsupervised segmentation of dual-polarization SAR images based on amplitude and texture characteristics

A new approach for the unsupervised segmentation of dual-polarization Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images based on statistics of both the amplitude variations and the textural characteristics of the data is presented. A co-polarized amplitude image and a cross-polarized amplitude image are used in this study. It is a two-step process. In the first step, these images are filtered once to suppress the speckle noise while preserving the contrast associated with edges and subtle details. The feature vector composed of the two filtered image pixels is assumed to have a joint Gaussian distribution. A scanning window is used to discover clusters at each position. A merging procedure follows to combine these clusters based on the Mahalanobis distance measure, into a number appropriate for the image. A Bayes maximum likelihood classifier is then applied. In the second step, we adopt the second-order Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) models for image textures in the original un-filtered images. Segments assigned to each class in the first step are examined for possible sub-division into groups, based on textural characteristics. Two segments are considered texturally similar if the ratio of the pseudo-likelihoods of the image before and after merging is close to one.     

Unsupervised classification of image texture

An automatic histogram-based algorithm for clustering statistical textural features of image incorporating estimation of the quality of the obtained distribution of feature vectors over clusters is presented. The algorithms is applied to classification of forest aerial imagery. Valeriya S. Sidorova. Born 1947. Graduated Novosibirsk State University in 1972. Researcher at Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics. Scientific interests: classification of remote sensing data, texture analysis, and 3D visualization. Author of 40 papers.     

Unsupervised segmentation with dynamical units.

In this paper, we present a novel network to separate mixtures of inputs that have been previously learned. A significant capability of the network is that it segments the components of each input object that most contribute to its classification. The network consists of amplitude-phase units that can synchronize their dynamics, so that separation is determined by the amplitude of units in an output layer, and segmentation by phase similarity between input and output layer units. Learning is unsupervised and based on a Hebbian update, and the architecture is very simple. Moreover, efficient segmentation can be achieved even when there is considerable superposition of the inputs. The network dynamics are derived from an objective function that rewards sparse coding in the generalized amplitude-phase variables. We argue that this objective function can provide a possible formal interpretation of the binding problem and that the implementation of the network architecture and dynamics is biologically plausible.     

Unsupervised multiscale segmentation of color images

This paper proposes a new multiresolution technique for color image representation and segmentation, particularly suited for noisy images. A decimated wavelet transform is initially applied to each color channel of the image, and a multiresolution representation is built up to a selected scale 2^J. Color gradient magnitudes are computed at the coarsest scale 2^J, and an adaptive threshold is used to remove spurious responses. An initial segmentation is then computed by applying the watershed transform to thresholded magnitudes, and this initial segmentation is projected to finer resolutions using inverse wavelet transforms and contour refinements, until the full resolution 2⁰ is achieved. Finally, a region merging technique is applied to combine adjacent regions with similar colors. Experimental results show that the proposed technique produces results comparable to other state-of-the-art algorithms for natural images, and performs better for noisy images.     

Unsupervised help-trained LS-SVR-based segmentation in speaker diarization system

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, we propose a new segmentation method for diarization applications. In the proposed method, segmentation is performed using a discriminatively...     

Unsupervised segmentation of color-texture regions in images andvideo

A method for unsupervised segmentation of color-texture regions in images and video is presented. This method, which we refer to as JSEG, consists of two independent steps: color quantization and spatial segmentation. In the first step, colors in the image are quantized to several representative classes that can be used to differentiate regions in the image. The image pixels are then replaced by their corresponding color class labels, thus forming a class-map of the image. The focus of this work is on spatial segmentation, where a criterion for “good” segmentation using the class-map is proposed. Applying the criterion to local windows in the class-map results in the “J-image,” in which high and low values correspond to possible boundaries and interiors of color-texture regions. A region growing method is then used to segment the image based on the multiscale J-images. A similar approach is applied to video sequences. An additional region tracking scheme is embedded into the region growing process to achieve consistent segmentation and tracking results, even for scenes with nonrigid object motion. Experiments show the robustness of the JSEG algorithm on real images and video     

Unsupervised segmentation of unknown objects in complex environments

This paper presents a novel object segmentation approach for highly complex indoor scenes. Our approach starts with a novel algorithm which partitions the scene into distinct regions whose boundaries accurately conform to the physical object boundaries in the scene. Next, we propose a novel perceptual grouping algorithm based on local cues (e.g., 3D proximity, co-planarity, and shape convexity) to merge these regions into object hypotheses. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our object segmentation results are superior compared to the state-of-the-art methods.     

Image segmentation using a local extrema texture measure

An image segmentation technique is proposed which uses a texture measure that counts the number of local extrema in a window centered at each picture point. Four gray level pictures are derived, each of which represents a texture or gray level property of the original image. These intermediate pictures are used to derive the number of segments in which to divide the original image. The segmentation is then performed by assigning each pixel in the original image to a region by using a four-dimensional distance measure on the intermediate pictures, comparing each location to each selected segment. This process is then repeated in a hierarchical structure using decreasing window sizes so that smaller regions within the larger ones are defined. The computations required are amenable to real-time video implementation using state-of-the-art devices.     

Unsupervised scene segmentation using sparse coding context

This paper presents an approach to image understanding on the aspect of unsupervised scene segmentation. With the goal of image understanding in mind, we consider ‘unsupervised scene segmentation’ a task of dividing a given image into semantically meaningful regions without using annotation or other human-labeled information. We seek to investigate how well an algorithm can achieve at partitioning an image with limited human-involved learning procedures. Specifically, we are interested in developing an unsupervised segmentation algorithm that only relies on the contextual prior learned from a set of images. Our algorithm incorporates a small set of images that are similar to the input image in their scene structures. We use the sparse coding technique to analyze the appearance of this set of images; the effectiveness of sparse coding allows us to derive a priori the context of the scene from the set of images. Gaussian mixture models can then be constructed for different parts of the input image based on the sparse-coding contextual prior, and can be combined into an Markov-random-field-based segmentation process. The experimental results show that our unsupervised segmentation algorithm is able to partition an image into semantic regions, such as buildings, roads, trees, and skies, without using human-annotated information. The semantic regions generated by our algorithm can be useful, as pre-processed inputs for subsequent classification-based labeling algorithms, in achieving automatic scene annotation and scene parsing.     

Unsupervised segmentation evaluation: an edge-based method

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Unsupervised segmentation evaluation method quantifies the quality of segmentation without the reference segmentation or user assistance. Although some methods...     

Unsupervised image segmentation using triplet Markov fields

Hidden Markov fields (HMF) models are widely applied to various problems arising in image processing. In these models, the hidden process of interest X is a Markov field and must be estimated from its observable noisy version Y. The success of HMF is mainly due to the fact that the conditional probability distribution of the hidden process with respect to the observed one remains Markovian, which facilitates different processing strategies such as Bayesian restoration. HMF have been recently generalized to “pairwise” Markov fields (PMF), which offer similar processing advantages and superior modeling capabilities. In PMF one directly assumes the Markovianity of the pair (X, Y). Afterwards, “triplet” Markov fields (TMF), in which the distribution of the pair (X, Y) is the marginal distribution of a Markov field (X, U, Y), where U is an auxiliary process, have been proposed and still allow restoration processing. The aim of this paper is to propose a new parameter estimation method adapted to TMF, and to study the corresponding unsupervised image segmentation methods. The latter are validated via experiments and real image processing.