Abstract
This paper provides an algorithm for partitioning grayscale images into disjoint regions of coherent brightness and texture. Natural images contain both textured and untextured regions, so the cues of contour and texture differences are exploited simultaneously. Contours are treated in the intervening contour framework, while texture is analyzed using textons. Each of these cues has a domain of applicability, so to facilitate cue combination we introduce a gating operator based on the texturedness of the neighborhood at a pixel. Having obtained a local measure of how likely two nearby pixels are to belong to the same region, we use the spectral graph theoretic framework of normalized cuts to find partitions of the image into regions of coherent texture and brightness. Experimental results on a wide range of images are shown.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Belongie, S., Carson, C., Greenspan, H., and Malik, J. 1998. Colorand texture-based image segmentation using EM and its application to content-based image retrieval. In Proc. 6th Int. Conf. Computer Vision, Bombay, India, pp. 675-682.
Belongie, S. and Malik, J. 1998. Finding boundaries in natural images: A new method using point descriptors and area completion. In Proc. 5th Euro. Conf. Computer Vision, Freiburg, Germany, pp. 751-766.
Binford, T. 1981. Inferring surfaces from images. Artificial Intelligence, 17(1-3):205-244.
Canny, J. 1986. A computational approach to edge detection. IEEE Trans. Pat. Anal. Mach. Intell., 8(6):679-698.
Chung, F. 1997. Spectral Graph Theory, AMS. Providence, RI.
DeValois, R. and DeValois, K. 1988. Spatial Vision. Oxford University Press. New York, N.Y.
Duda, R. and Hart, P. 1973. Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis, John Wiley & Sons. New York, N.Y.
Elder, J. and Zucker, S. 1996. Computing contour closures. In Proc. Euro. Conf. Computer Vision, Vol. I, Cambridge, England, pp. 399-412.
Fogel, I. and Sagi, D. 1989. Gabor filters as texture discriminator. Biological Cybernetics, 61:103-113.
Geman, S. and Geman, D. 1984. Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs distribution, and the Bayesian retoration of images. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 6:721-741.
Gersho, A. and Gray, R. 1992. Vector Quantization and Signal Compression, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA.
Heeger, D.J. and Bergen, J.R. 1995. Pyramid-based texture analysis/ synthesis. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '95, pp. 229-238.
Jacobs, D. 1996. Robust and efficient detection of salient convex groups. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 18(1):23-37.
Jones, D. and Malik, J. 1992. Computational framework to determining stereo correspondence from a set of linear spatial filters. Image and Vision Computing, 10(10):699-708.
Julesz, B. 1981. Textons, the elements of texture perception, and their interactions. Nature, 290(5802):91-97.
Knutsson, H. and Granlund, G. 1983. Texture analysis using twodimensional quadrature filters. In Workshop on Computer Architecture for Pattern Analysis and Image Database Management, pp. 206-213.
Koenderink, J. and van Doorn, A. 1987. Representation of local geometry in the visual system. Biological Cybernetics, 55(6):367-375.
Koenderink, J. and van Doorn, A. 1988. Operational significance of receptive field assemblies. Biological Cybernetics, 58:163-171.
Leung, T. and Malik, J. 1998. Contour continuity in region-based image segmentation. In Proc. Euro. Conf. Computer Vision,Vol. 1, H. Burkhardt and B. Neumann (Eds.). Freiburg, Germany, pp. 544-559.
Leung, T. and Malik, J. 1999. Recognizing surfaces using threedimensional textons. In Proc. Int. Conf. Computer Vision, Corfu, Greece, pp. 1010-1017.
Malik, J., Belongie, S., Shi, J., and Leung, T. 1999. Textons, contours and regions: Cue integration in image segmentation. In Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. Computer Vision, Vol. 2, Corfu, Greece, pp. 918-925.
Malik, J. and Perona, P. 1990. Preattentive texture discrimination with early vision mechanisms. J. Optical Society of America, 7(2):923-932.
Malik, J. and Perona, P. 1992. Finding boundaries in images. In Neural Networks for Perception, Vol. 1, H. Wechsler (Ed.). Academic Press, pp. 315-344.
Martin, D., Fowlkes, C., Tal, D., and Malik, J. 2000. A database of human segmented natural images and its application to evaluating segmentation algorithms and measuring ecological statistics. Technical Report UCB CSD-01-1133, University of California at Berkeley. http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/vision/Grouping/ overview.html.
McLean, G. 1993. Vector quantization for texture classification. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 23(3):637-649.
Montanari, U. 1971. On the optimal detection of curves in noisy pictures. Comm. Ass. Comput., 14:335-345.
Morrone, M. and Burr, D. 1988. Feature detection in human vision: Aphase dependent energy model. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, 235:221-245.
Morrone, M. and Owens, R. 1987. Feature detection from local energy. Pattern Recognition Letters, 6:303-313.
Mumford, D. and Shah, J. 1989. Optimal approximations by piecewise smooth functions, and associated variational problems. Comm. Pure Math., 42:577-684.
Parent, P. and Zucker, S. 1989. Trace inference, curvature consistency, and curve detection. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 11(8):823-839.
Perona, P. and Malik, J. 1990. Detecting and localizing edges composed of steps, peaks and roofs. In Proc. 3rd Int. Conf. Computer Vision, Osaka, Japan, pp. 52-57.
Puzicha, J., Hofmann, T., and Buhmann, J. 1997. Non-parametric similarity measures for unsupervised texture segmentation and image retrieval. In Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, San Juan, Puerto Rico, pp. 267-272.
Raghu, P., Poongodi, R., and Yegnanarayana, B. 1997. Unsupervised texture classification using vector quantization and deterministic relaxation neural network. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 6(10):1376-1387.
Sha'ashua, A. and Ullman, S. 1988. 'Structural saliency: The detection of globally salient structures using a locally connected network. In Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. Computer Vision, Tampa, FL, USA, pp. 321-327.
Shi, J. and Malik, J. 1997. Normalized cuts and image segmentation. In Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, San Juan, Puerto Rico, pp. 731-737.
Shi, J. and Malik, J. 2000. Normalized cuts and image segmentation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 22(8):888-905.
Weiss, Y. 1999. Segmentation using eigenvectors: A unifying view. In Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. Computer Vision, Vol. 2, Corfu, Greece, pp. 975-982.
Wertheimer, M. 1938. Laws of organization in perceptual forms (partial translation). In A Sourcebook of Gestalt Psychology, W. Ellis (Ed.). Harcourt Brace and Company, pp. 71-88.
Williams, L. and Jacobs, D. 1995. Stochastic completion fields: A neural model of illusory contour shape and salience. In Proc. 5th Int. Conf. Computer Vision, Cambridge, MA, pp. 408-415.
Young, R.A. 1985. The Gaussian derivative theory of spatial vision: Analysis of cortical cell receptive field lineweighting profiles. Technical Report GMR-4920, General Motors Research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Malik, J., Belongie, S., Leung, T. et al. Contour and Texture Analysis for Image Segmentation. International Journal of Computer Vision 43, 7–27 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011174803800
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011174803800