Segmentation of color images via reversible jump MCMC sampling

  • Authors:
  • Zoltan Kato

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Szeged, Institute of Informatics, P.O. Box 652, H-6701 Szeged, Hungary

  • Venue:
  • Image and Vision Computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) is a recent method which makes it possible to construct reversible Markov chain samplers that jump between parameter subspaces of different dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a new RJMCMC sampler for multivariate Gaussian mixture identification and we apply it to color image segmentation. For this purpose, we consider a first order Markov random field (MRF) model where the singleton energies derive from a multivariate Gaussian distribution and second order potentials favor similar classes in neighboring pixels. The proposed algorithm finds the most likely number of classes, their associated model parameters and generates a segmentation of the image by classifying the pixels into these classes. The estimation is done according to the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) criterion. The algorithm has been validated on a database of real images with human segmented ground truth.