A Novel Color-Texture Descriptor Based on Local Histograms for Image Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel color-texture image segmentation method based on local histograms. Starting with clustering-based color quantization, we extract a sufficient number of representative colors. For each pixel, through counting the number of pixels with each representative color within a circular neighborhood, a local histogram is obtained. After the circular neighborhood is extended to several scales, a local histogram with an appropriate scale is adopted as a color-texture descriptor at the corresponding pixel for image segmentation. Further, we correct the color-texture features near boundaries and obtain a initial segmentation by a clustering method with the color-texture descriptors. Finally, in order to obtain a better segmentation result, we merge the over segmented regions guided by the obtained boundaries. Experiments are performed on both synthetic and natural color-texture images, and the results show that our proposed method performs much better compared with state-of-the-art methods on image segmentation, particularly in textured areas.