Multi-resolution image segmentation based on Gaussian mixture model*

Mixture model based image segmentation method, which assumes that image pixels are independent and do not consider the position relationship between pixels, is not robust to noise and usually leads to misclassification. A new segmentation method, called multi-resolution Gaussian mixture model method, is proposed. First, an image pyramid is constructed and son-father link relationship is built between each level of pyramid. Then the mixture model segmentation method is applied to the top level. The segmentation result on the top level is passed top-down to the bottom level according to the son-father link relationship between levels. The proposed method considers not only local but also global information of image, it overcomes the effect of noise and can obtain better segmentation result. Experimental result demonstrates its effectiveness.