Advances in the segmentation and compression of multispectral images

Presents a new low-complexity technique for the segmentation of multispectral images, based on the use of a tree-structured Markov random field model. The image is associated with a binary tree, and is segmented recursively through a sequence of local splits based on a maximum a posteriori probability rule. To improve the reliability of the process, merging of nodes is now considered besides splitting, so as to allow for the re-shaping of incorrect region boundaries. Experimental results show that the new algorithm increases the fitness of the segmentation to the actual features of the image.