MRF Model Based Unsupervised Color Textured Image Segmentation Using Multidimensional Spatially Variant Finite Mixture Model

Abstract

We investigate and propose a novel approach to implement an unsupervised color image segmentation model that segments a color image meaningfully and partitions into its constituent parts automatically. The aim is to devise a robust unsupervised segmentation approach that can segment a color textured image more accurately. Here, color and texture information of each individual pixel along with the spatial relationship within its neighborhood have been considered for producing more accuracy in segmentation. In this particular work, the problem we want to investigate is to implement a robust unsupervised Multidimensional Spatially Variant Finite Mixture Model (MSVFMM) based color image segmentation approach using Cluster Ensembles and MRF model along with Daubechies wavelet transforms for increasing the content sensitivity of the segmentation model in order to get a better accuracy in segmentation. Here, Cluster Ensemble has been utilized as a robust automatic tool for finding the number of components in an image. The main idea behind this work is introducing a Bayesian inference based approach to estimate the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) to identify the different objects/components in a color image. Markov Random Field (MRF) plays a crucial role in capturing the relationships among the neighboring pixels. An Expectation Maximization (EM) model fitting MAP algorithm segments the image utilizing the pixel’s color and texture features and the captured neighborhood relationships among them. The algorithm simultaneously calculates the model parameters and segments the pixels iteratively in an interleaved manner. Finally, it converges to a solution where the model parameters and pixel labels are stabilized within a specified criterion. Finally, we have compared our results with another recent segmentation approach [10], which is similar in nature. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach is capable of producing more accurate and faithful segmentation and can be employed in different practical image content understanding applications.