Pixon-based image segmentation with Markov random fields

Image segmentation is an essential processing step for many image analysis applications. In this paper, we propose a novel pixon-based adaptive scale method for image segmentation. The key idea of our approach is that a pixon-based image model is combined with a Markov random field (MRF) model under a Bayesian framework. In our method, we introduce a new pixon scheme that is more suitable for image segmentation than the "fuzzy" pixon scheme. The anisotropic diffusion equation is successfully used to form the pixons in our new pixon scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm performs fairly well and computational costs decrease dramatically compared with the pixel-based MRF algorithm.