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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1389–1395Cite as

Image Segmentation

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Synonyms

Region segmentation; Pixel classification; Edge detection; Thresholding

Definition

The rapid rate of image analysis field has grown enormously in the past few decades. Image analysis intends to construct explicit, meaningful descriptions of physical objects in images. It can be divided into two parts: low-level image analysis and high-level image analysis. Low-level tasks focus on region-based segmentation, whereas high-level tasks are related to object-oriented representation. Image segmentation, a process of pixel classification, aims to extract or segment objects or regions from the background. Intrinsic images can be generated at the low-level processing, revealing physical properties of the imaged scene. This can often be implemented with parallel computation.

Historical Background

Image segmentation is a critical step to the success of object recognition [12], image compression [2], image visualization [7], and image retrieval [3]. Pal and Pal [13] provided a review on...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Frank Y. Shih

Authors
  1. Frank Y. Shih
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Shih, F.Y. (2009). Image Segmentation. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1011

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