Physics-based segmentation: moving beyond color

We previously presented a framework for segmentation of complex scenes using multiple physical hypotheses for simple image regions. A consequence of that framework was a proposal for a new approach to the segmentation of complex scenes into regions corresponding to coherent surfaces rather than merely regions of similar color. Herein we present an implementation of this new approach and show example segmentations for scenes containing multi-colored piece-wise uniform objects. Using our approach we are able to intelligently segment scenes with objects of greater complexity than previous physics-based segmentation algorithms. The results show that by using general physical models we obtain segmentations that correspond more closely to coherent surfaces in the scene than segmentations found using only color.