Patent ID: 7295711

Claim:
A method of video encoding or decoding including merging segments to form supersegments in an image, wherein said image consists of a plurality of segments that are constituent portions of the image, the method of video encoding or decoding comprising: identifying at least one candidate segment(s); identifying at least one neighboring segment(s) for each candidate segment; computing an error statistic for each pair, wherein each pair consists of a candidate segment and a corresponding neighboring segment; determining a neighboring segment that results in a smallest error statistic for a given candidate segment; determining whether said smallest error statistic is sufficiently small so as to be less than a threshold value so as to merit merging of the corresponding pair of segments; and merging said corresponding pair of segments to create one supersegment if said smallest error statistic is less than the threshold value, wherein a supersegment is a new segment comprising all pixels formerly contained in one of the two segments that were merged, wherein said error statistic is computed using one or more merging parameters selected from the group consisting of a difference in mean color between the two segments, a difference in color variance between the two segments, a measure of a color gradient along a common boundary between the two segments, a length of the common boundary, a total boundary length of the candidate segment, an area of the candidate segment, and an area of the neighboring segment.