A graph theory approach for automatic segmentation of color images

A hybrid split and merge segmentation method for color images is presented in this work. It combines edge and region information to merge adjacent regions produced in the initial watershed-based segmentation stage. A novel technique is introduced to simplify the Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) structure and speed-up the merging process along with a merging termination criterion for automatic segmentation. The robustness of the proposed method has been experimentally verified and compared to other previously reported merging approaches