Segmentation and description of natural outdoor scenes

A scene description and segmentation system capable of recognising natural objects (e.g. sky, trees, grass) under different outdoor conditions is presented. We propose an hybrid and probabilistic classifier of image regions as a first step in solving the problem of scene context generation. We focus our work in the problem of image regions labeling to classify every pixel of a given image into one of several predefined classes. The result is both a segmentation of the image and a recognition of each segment as a given object class or as an unknown segmented object. Classification performance has been evaluated with the Outex dataset and compared to the approach of Marti et al. (IVC 2001) and He et al. (CVPR 2004) using their own datasets, showing the superiority of our method. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.