Patent Document ID: 7672511
Application ID: 11472006
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer implemented method of segmenting a digitized image, comprising the steps of: providing a digitized image comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of points on an N-dimensional grid; defining a weight between each pair of adjacent points in the image based on the intensity difference of each said point pair; marking a subset of points in said image wherein each marked point is marked with one of a plurality of labels; determining the probability that an unmarked point should be marked with one of said plurality of labels using a multigrid method that uses a restriction operator to map said provided image to a coarse-level grid, and a prolongation operator to map said coarse-level image back to a fine-level grid, wherein said restriction operator is an adjoint of said prolongation operator, and wherein a fine-level segmentation is a prolongation of a coarse level segmentation, wherein an unmarked point is marked with a label having a highest probability, wherein said image is segmented by the labels that mark each point, and wherein said steps of defining a weight, marking a subset of points, and determining the probability are performed by a computer processor.