A region growing and merging algorithm to color segmentation

In this paper we present a color segmentation algorithm which combines region growing and region merging processes. This algorithm starts with the region growing process which is based on criteria that take into account color similarity and spatial proximity. The resulting regions are then merged on the basis of a criterion that takes into account only color similarity, in order to generate a non-partitioned segmentation of the image being processed in spatially disconnected but colorimetrically similar regions. Adequate attention is then paid to merge non-representative regions into the other ones to proceed to a segmentation which corresponds to the visual judgement. (C) 1997 Pattern Recognition Society.