A Conditional Random Field Approach to Unsupervised Texture Image Segmentation

An unsupervised multiresolution conditional random field (CRF) approach to texture segmentation problems is introduced. This approach involves local and long-range information in the CRF neighbourhood to determine the classes of image blocks. Like most Markov random field (MRF) approaches, the proposed method treats the image as an array of random variables and attempts to assign an optimal class label to each. While most MRFs involve only local information extracted from a small neighbourhood, our method also allows a few long-range blocks to be involved in the labelling process. This alleviates the problem of assigning different class labels to disjoint regions of the same texture and oversegmentation due to the lack of long-range interaction among the neighbouring and distant blocks. The proposed method requires no a priori knowledge of the number and types of regions/textures.