Watersheds in Digital Spaces: An Efficient Algorithm Based on Immersion Simulations
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Shape Modeling with Front Propagation: A Level Set Approach
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
The watershed transform: definitions, algorithms and parallelization strategies
Fundamenta Informaticae - Special issue on mathematical morphology
An Efficient k-Means Clustering Algorithm: Analysis and Implementation
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
A Genetic Algorithm Using Hyper-Quadtrees for Low-Dimensional K-means Clustering
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Computers in Biology and Medicine
Connectivity-based local adaptive thresholding for carotid artery segmentation using MRA images
Image and Vision Computing
IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
Snakes, shapes, and gradient vector flow
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Supervised range-constrained thresholding
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Journal of Systems and Software
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The watershed algorithm always produces a complete division of the image. However, it is susceptible to over-segmentation and sensitivity to false edges. In medical images this leads to unfavorable representations of the anatomy. We address these drawbacks by introducing automated thresholding and post-segmentation merging. The automated thresholding step is based on the histogram of the gradient magnitude map while post-segmentation merging is based on a criterion which measures the similarity in intensity values between two neighboring partitions. Our improved watershed algorithm is able to merge more than 90% of the initial partitions, which indicates that a large amount of over-segmentation has been reduced. To further improve the segmentation results, we make use of K-means clustering to provide an initial coarse segmentation of the highly textured image before the improved watershed algorithm is applied to it. When applied to the segmentation of the masseter from 60 magnetic resonance images of 10 subjects, the proposed algorithm achieved an overlap index (@k) of 90.6%, and was able to merge 98% of the initial partitions on average. The segmentation results are comparable to those obtained using the gradient vector flow snake.