A short note on local region growing by pseudophysical simulation

A class of region growing algorithms based on an analogy to a mass suspended in a field of forces is presented. The mass represents the growing region, and the field represents the degree of concordance between local pixel values and the color characteristics of the region. The algorithms are particularly well suited to systems that are looking for specific simply-connected shapes in local areas of interest, for example, a rectangle of unknown size, elongation, or orientation. Comparing pseudophysical region growing with Hough transforms, it is shown that region growing has competitive space and time complexity, and that it does not require image preprocessing for boundaries.<>