A fast region merging algorithm for watershed segmentation

This paper presents a new fast method for region merging after watershed segmentation. We name it Watershed Collapsing Algorithm (WCA), as its merging operation mimics the watershed collapsing and water flooding process to a great extent. The three stages of the algorithm are discussed in detail: Initialization, Region Dissimilarity Estimation, Watershed Collapsing and Region Flooding. In Region Dissimilarity Estimation stage, Butterworth Low-pass Filter is adopted to improve the Region Dissimilarity Function, which estimates the similarity of adjacent regions. The kernel of whole algorithm in WCA is the merging method based oil a flooding process analogy, Experimental results on various images demonstrate the efficiency of the presented algorithm. And statistics of execution time indicate that the proposed algorithm is much faster than region-based methods.