Color image segmentation for multimedia applications

Image segmentation is crucial for multimedia applications. Multimedia databases utilize segmentation for the storage and indexing of images and video. Image segmentation is used for object tracking in the new MPEG-7 video compression standard. It is also used in video conferencing for compression and coding purposes. These are only some of the multimedia applications in image segmentation. It is usually the first task of any image analysis process, and thus, subsequent tasks rely heavily on the quality of segmentation. The proposed method of color image segmentation is very effective in segmenting a multimedia-type image into regions. Pixels are first classified as either chromatic or achromatic depending on their HSI color values. Next, a seed determination algorithm finds seed pixels that are in the center of regions. These seed pixels are used in the region growing step to grow regions by comparing these seed pixels to neighboring pixels using the cylindrical distance metric. Merging regions that are similar in color is a final means used for segmenting the image into even smaller regions.