Unsupervised scene segmentation
AssigneeCo-Operative Research Centre for Sensor Signal and information Processing
InventorsPascal Bamford, Paul Jackaway
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method of segmenting objects in an image is described. The method applies a Top Hat algorithm to the image then constructs inner and outer markers for application to the original image in a Watershed algorithm. The inner marker is constructed using binary erosion. The outer marker is constructed using binary dilation and perimeterisation. The method finds particular application for first level segmentation of a cell nucleus prior to detailed analysis.
Claims14
An improved method of scene segmentation including the steps of:
- (i) transforming an input image by a Top Hat operator;
- (ii) conducting erosion on said Top Hat transformed image to produce an inner marker image;
- (iii) eliminating objects less than an object-of-interest size by reconstructing said Top Hat transformed image with said inner marker image to produce a reconstructed image;
- (iv) conducting dilation on said reconstructed image to produce an outer marker image;
- (v) determining a perimeter of said outer marker image;
- and
- (vi) transforming said input image using said inner marker image and said perimeterised outer marker image by a Watershed operator to produce a segmented image of objects.
A Top Hat operator for transforming an input image for scene segmentation of the form:
- H=f−((f⊕(Bdo\Bdi))⊖Bdi),
- where f is the original image, Bdo and Bdi are outer and inner structuring elements respectively, ⊕, ⊖ and\are standard morphological operators of dilation, erosion and set difference respectively.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.