On the use of the overlapping area matrix for image segmentation evaluation: A survey and new performance measures

The development of common and reasonable criteria for evaluating and comparing the performance of segmentation algorithms has always been a concern for researchers in the area. As it is discussed in the paper, some of the measures proposed are not adequate for general images (i.e. images of any sort of scene, without any assumption about the features of the scene objects or the illumination distribution) because they assume a certain distribution of pixel gray-level or colour values for the interior of the regions. This paper reviews performance measures not performing such an assumption and proposes a set of new performance measures in the same line, called the percentage of correctly grouped pixels (CG), the percentage of over-segmentation (OS) and the percentage of under-segmentation (US). Apart from accounting for misclassified pixels, the proposed set of new measures are intended to compute the level of fragmentation of reference regions into output regions and vice versa. A comparison involving similar measures is provided at the end of the paper.