Patent ID: 7596265

Claim:
A method of segmenting pixels in an input image, comprising operating a computer processor to perform operations comprising: identifying in the input image a region of background pixels at least some of which are located on a boundary spatially delimiting the region; determining orientation-dependent adaptive thresholds for respective candidate growth directions from a given background pixel located on the region boundary; determining color distances between the given background pixel and candidate pixels in a neighborhood of the given background pixel; for each of the candidate pixels, associating the candidate pixel with a respective one of the orientation-dependent adaptive thresholds based on the orientation of the candidate pixel in relation to the given background pixel and growing the region to include the candidate pixel based on application of the associated orientation-dependent adaptive threshold to the determined color distance between the candidate pixel and the given background pixel; and producing an output image, wherein the producing comprises extracting at least one object from the input image based on the grown region.