Grayscale Image Segmentation Using Color Space

A novel approach for segmentation of grayscale images, which are color scene originally, is proposed. Many algorithms have been elaborated for a grayscale image segmentation. All those approaches have been discussed in a luminance space, because it has been considered that grayscale images do not have any color information. However, a luminance value has color information as a set of corresponding colors. In this paper, an inverse mapping of luminance values is carried out to CIELAB color space, and the image segmentation for grayscale images is performed based on a distance in the color space. The proposed scheme is applied to a region growing segmentation and the performance is verified. key words: image segmentation, color space, grayscale image, region growing