Morphological object picking based on the color tree of shapes

The Tree of Shapes is a self-dual and contrast invariant morphological tree that provides a high-level hierarchical representation of images, suitable for many image processing tasks. Despite its powerfulness and its simplicity, it is still under-exploited in pattern recognition and computer vision. In this paper, we show that both interactive and automatic image segmentation can be achieved with some simple tree processings. To that aim, we rely on the "Color Tree of Shapes", recently defined. We propose a method for interactive segmentation that does not involve any statistical learning, yet yielding results that compete with state-of-the-art approaches. We further extend this algorithm to unsupervised segmentation and give some results. Although they are preliminary, they highlight the potential of such an approach that works in the shape space.