Unsupervised image segmentation based on material reflectance description and saliency

• Autores: Eduardo Vazquez Marco
• Directores de la Tesis: Ramon Baldrich i Caselles (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2011
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Allan Hanbury (presid.), Robert Benavente i Vidal (secret.), Bobby Tang Dan (voc.)
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
• Resumen

  • Image segmentations aims to partition an image into a set of non-overlapped regions, called segments. Despite the simplicity of the definition, image segmentation raises as a very complex problem in all its stages. The definition of segment is still unclear. When asking to a human to perform a segmentation, this person segments at different levels of abstraction. Some segments might be a single, well-defined texture whereas some others correspond with an object in the scene which might including multiple textures and colors. For this reason, segmentation is divided in bottom-up segmentation and top-down segmentation. Bottom up-segmentation is problem in dependent, that is, focused on general properties of the images such as textures or illumination. Top-down segmentation is a problem-dependent approach which looks for specific entities in the scene, such as known objects.

    This work is focused on bottom-up segmentation. Beginning from the analysis of the lacks of current methods, we propose an approach called RAD. Our approach overcomes the main shortcomings of those methods which use the physics of the light to perform the segmentation. RAD is a topological approach which describes a single-material reflectance.

    Afterwards, we cope with one of the main problems in image segmentation: non supervised adaptability to image content. To yield a non-supervised method, we use a model of saliency yet presented in this thesis. It computes the saliency of the chromatic transitions of an image by means of a statistical analysis of the images derivatives. This method of saliency is used to build our final approach of segmentation: spRAD. This method is a non-supervised segmentation approach.

    Our saliency approach has been validated with a psychophysical experiment as well as computationally, overcoming a state-of-the-art saliency method.

    spRAD also outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation techniques as results obtained with a widely-used segmentation dataset show.