Method and apparatus for measuring color-texture distance, and method and apparatus for sectioning image into plurality of regions using measured color-texture distance

An apparatus for measuring a color-texture distance comprising:

• a color distance calculator that assigns different degrees of importance to a brightness difference, a saturation difference, and a hue difference between two points in a color feature space constituted of color feature values for pixels in an image, adds the brightness difference, the saturation difference, and the hue difference in proportion to the assigned degrees of importance, and outputs the added result as a color distance between the two points;
• a texture distance calculator that inputs texture feature values for the two points in a texture feature space constituted of texture feature values for the pixels in the image, detects a difference between the input texture feature values, calculates a texture distance between the two points from weighting coefficients applied to multiple scales of a texture and the detected difference, and outputs the calculated texture distance;
• and
• a color-texture distance generator that multiplies a color weight value by the color distance output from the color distance calculator, multiplies a texture weight value by the texture distance output from the texture distance calculator, adds the multiplication results together, and outputs the addition result as a color-texture distance,
• wherein the degrees of importance are determined on a basis that a hue is more important than a brightness or a saturation, a color becomes black as the brightness approaches an absolute value, and the hue has an arbitrary value as the saturation approaches the absolute value.