Flotation bubble image segmentation based on seed region boundary growing

Segmenting blurred and conglutinated bubbles in a flotation image is done using a new segmentation method based on Seed Region and Boundary Growing (SRBG). Bright pixels located on bubble tops were extracted as the seed regions. Seed boundaries are divided into four curves: left-top, right-top, right-bottom, and left-bottom. Bubbles are segmented from the seed boundary by moving these curves to the bubble boundaries along the corresponding directions. The SRBG method can remove noisy areas and it avoids over- and under-segmentation problems. Each bubble is segmented separately rather than segmenting the entire flotation image. The segmentation results from the SRBG method are more accurate than those from the Watershed algorithm.