Fast and Robust Segmentation of Natural Color Scenes

One of the most important tasks of an image analysis system is image segmentation, the identification of homogeneous regions in an image. In the literature several methods for segmentation are distinguished. Common are edge detection, split and merge, region growing and clustering techniques. Most of the extensive research on image segmentation in the last three decades has been done for gray scale images. However, as the technical equipment for color image acquisition becomes cheaper and more common, color image analysis becomes more and more important. Nearly all techniques for gray scale image segmentation have been transferred to color images. A survey on color image segmentation can be found in [SK94].