Image Analysis by Discrete Relative Vector Field

A novel method of relative vector field is proposed for gray-scale image analysis by imitating the electro-static field. It extends the mathematical form of electro-static field by introducing the item of gray-scale difference, which represents the local difference between adjacent image points. The local image regions can be segmented based on the relative vector field with a proposed region-growing method, and practical image segmentation can be archived by merging primitive regions. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.