XPMap-Based Irregular Pyramids for Image Segmentation

Acknowledgements It is hard for me to keep these words short. First of all, my biggest thanks go to Ulli, for making me come to KOGS and stay there, introducing countless ideas and approaches to me that I cannot live without anymore, creating the VIGRA library, and finally, customiz-ing my thesis's topic to meet my interests (in fact, it seemed this was just a selection of favorites out of an endless store of ideas he collected in the last years. . .) Furthermore, I want to thank Prof. Stiehl for rising and feeding my interest in computer vision (and biological vision) throughout my studies and beyond. I have to thank Katrin (who encouraged me throughout the work), Gunnar, and Peer for reading parts of the thesis and giving me feedback, Ji-Young for both spending time reading and discussing my thesis and lending me several useful books, and in particular Jürgen, who probably spent more time reading my thesis than even Ulli. Finally, I cannot thank everyone at KOGS personally here, so let my just say I am glad to work in the company of Alex (thanks for all L A T E X-related ideas), Dieter, Gunnar, Jörn (who gave wise tips in many situations), Joshua, Leonid, Peer, Sven (from whom I learned countless vision-and computer-related things), Thomas (who had very interesting and inspiring discussions with me) Erklärung Hiermit erkläre ich, daß ich die vorliegende Diplomarbeit selbstständig durchgeführt und dabei keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen benutzt habe.