A low cost hybrid diffusion technique for object segmentation

In this paper a low-complexity nonlinear filtering technique to smooth textures preserving object contours is presented. The approach is based on a hybrid combination of both isotropic and anisotropic recursive filtering. Using only intensity information the segment borders obtained by applying nonlinear filtering do not necessarily coincide with physical object contours, especially in the case of textured objects. To segment images into regions with physical meaning additional information extracted from disparity or motion is used to weight the filter coefficients. The presented technique has been successfully tested in the context of object segmentation of natural scenes and object-based disparity estimation for stereoscopic applications.