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Region Splitting

The basic idea of region splitting is to break the image into a set of disjoint regions which are coherent within themselves:

If only a splitting schedule is used then the final segmentation would probably contain many neighbouring regions that have identical or similar properties.

Thus, a merging process is used after each split which compares adjacent regions and merges them if necessary. Algorithms of this nature are called split and merge algorithms.

To illustrate the basic principle of these methods let us consider an imaginary image.

 

Fig. 35 Example of region splitting and merging

We can describe the splitting of the image using a tree structure, using a modified quadtree. Each non-terminal node in the tree has at most four descendants, although it may have less due to merging. See Fig. 36.

 

Fig. 36 Region splitting and merging tree


next up previous
Next: Region Growing Up: Segmentation Previous: Segmentation

tex2html_wrap_inline2984 David Marshall 1994-1997