Region growing and region merging image segmentation

Image segmentation is an important first task of any image analysis process. This paper presents a seeded region growing and merging algorithm that was created to segment grey scale and colour images. The approach starts with a set of seed pixels and from these grows regions by appending to each seed pixel those neighbouring pixels that satisfy a certain predicate. Small regions of far away values were merged to neighbouring regions while regions of similar value were also merged. Homogeneity functions are introduced for both grey scale and colour images.