Graph-based Analysis of Textured Images for Hierarchical Segmentation

The Texture Fragmentation and Reconstruction (TFR) algorithm has been recently introduced to address the problem of image segmentation by textural properties, based on a suitable image description tool known as the Hierarchical Multiple Markov Chain (H-MMC) model. TFR provides a hierarchical set of nested segmentation maps by first identifying the elementary image patterns, and then merging them sequentially to identify complete textures at different scales of observation. In this work, we propose a major modification to the TFR by resorting to a graph based description of the image content and a graph clustering technique for the enhancement and extraction of image patterns. A procedure based on mathematical morphology will be introduced that allows for the construction of a color-wise image representation by means of multiple graph structures, along with a simple clustering technique aimed at cutting the graphs and correspondingly segment groups of connected components with a similar spatial context. The performance assessment, realized both on synthetic compositions of real-world textures and images from the remote sensing domain, confirm the effectiveness and potential of the proposed method.