Patent ID: 7599557
Filing Date: 2009-10-06
Classification: G06K,G06T

Abstract:
1. An image segmentation method in which a region belonging to the same category is specified from an input image by a pixel unit to identify an image segmentation region, the method comprising: a block dividing step of dividing the input image into a plurality of blocks; an initialization step including a step of bringing all a plurality of cells, which are disposed for each pixel of the divided block and which shift in non-ignited, self-ignitable, and ignited states, into the non-ignited state, a step of calculating a coupling weight of each of the plurality of cells with an adjacent cell based on a pixel value of the pixel corresponding to each of the plurality of cells, a step of determining one or more leader cells including candidates of self-ignitable cells from the plurality of cells based on a calculation result of the coupling weight, and a step of setting a global suppressor which is a variable to determine whether or not a cell being ignited exists in the plurality of cells to an initial value; a first detection step of detecting the leader cell as the self-ignitable cell in order from the plurality of cells; a self-ignition step of bringing the self-ignitable cell detected in the first detection step into the ignited state; a second detection step of detecting an ignitable cell from adjacent cells based on the coupling weight calculation result with the respective adjacent cells with respect to the cells in the ignited state including the leader cell; an ignition step of bringing the cell detected in the second detection step into the ignited state; and an extinguishing step of bringing all the cells in the ignited state in an extinguished state in a case where the corresponding cell is not detected in the second detection step, the method including: a first processing routine of repeatedly performing the ignition step until the corresponding cell is not detected in the second detection step to complete the image segmentation of the region; a second processing routine of repeatedly performing a series of processing by the self-ignition step, the second detection step, the ignition step, and the extinguishing step until there is no leader cell in the non-ignited state in the first detection step to complete the image segmentation of all the regions; and a third processing routine of successively synthesizing processing results of the image segmentation region obtained for each divided block to obtain the whole image segmentation region, wherein the block dividing step comprises dividing the plurality of blocks in such a manner that each boundary overlaps with an adjacent block by at least one or more pixels, and the step of determining the leader cell in the initialization step comprises determining a cell as the leader cell beforehand in a case where the cell included in a certain image segmentation region of the block that has completed the image segmentation exists in a portion overlapping with the adjacent block.