Image segmentation via multi-scale stochastic regional texture appearance models

• We propose multi-scale stochastic regional texture appearance models for image segmentation.
• An image representation is constructed using an iterative bilateral scale space decomposition.
• Local texture features are extracted via random projections obtaining stochastic texture features.
• A texton dictionary is built and is used to represent the global texture appearance model.
• Based on experiments and comparisons, the method can be effective for textured images.

An ongoing challenge in the area of image segmentation is in dealing with scenes exhibiting complex textural characteristics. While many approaches have been proposed to tackle this particular challenge, a related topic of interest that has not been fully explored for dealing with this challenge is stochastic texture models, particularly for characterizing textural characteristics within regions of varying sizes and shapes. Therefore, this paper presents a novel method for image segmentation based on the concept of multi-scale stochastic regional texture appearance models. In the proposed method, a multi-scale representation of the image is constructed using an iterative bilateral scale space decomposition. Local texture features are then extracted via image patches and random projections to generate stochastic texture features. A texton dictionary is built from the stochastic features, and used to represent the global texture appearance model. Based on this global texture appearance model, a regional texture appearance model can then be obtained based on the texton occurrence probability given a region within an image. Finally, a stochastic region merging algorithm that allows the computation of complex features is presented to perform image segmentation based on proposed regional texture appearance model. Experimental results using the BDSD300 segmentation dataset showed that the proposed method achieves a Probabilistic Rand Index (PRI) of 0.83 and an F-measure of 0.77@(0.92, 0.68), and provides improved handling of color and luminance variation, as well as strong segmentation performance for images with highly textured regions when compared to a number of previous methods. These results suggest that the proposed stochastic regional texture appearance model is better suited for handling the texture variations of natural scenes, leading to more accurate segmentations, particularly in situations characterized by complex textural characteristics.