Color and/or texture segmentation using deterministic relaxation and fast marching algorithms

The segmentation of colored texture images is considered. Either luminance, color, and/or texture features could be used for segmentation. For luminance and color the classes are described using the corresponding empirical probability distributions. The discrete wavelet frames analysis is used for obtaining features of texture patterns. At a first stage, pattern analysis is performed for extracting the features using the Bhattacharya distance. Two labeling algorithms are proposed. A deterministic relaxation algorithm using a likelihood based distance yields the labeling of pixels to the different color-texture patterns. In addition, a multi-label fast marching level set algorithm is utilized for the determination of the segment boundaries.