A region-based color image segmentation scheme

A color image segmentation technique is presented for use in coding and/or compression of video-conferencing sequences. The proposed technique utilizes the perceptual HSI (hue,saturation,intensity) color space. The effectiveness of the scheme is improved by first splitting the pixels in the image into chromatic and achromatic regions using a classification method. A region growing scheme is then employed to each of the set of chromatic and achromatic pixels to segment the image. For the achromatic pixels a simple intensity difference metric is used. For the chromatic pixels three distance metrics were compared. Results are shown for three video-conferencing type images.