A colour image segmentation method and its application to medical images

In this paper, we propose a segmentation model using an anisotropic multi-well potential-based nonlinear transient PDE for colour images. A channel-wise greyscale classification approach is devised for colour image segmentation. The time evolution of the PDE model is carried out by the implicit–explicit convexity splitting approach. Further, we consider the fractional version of the time-discretised model by replacing the Laplacian with its fractional counterpart. The spatial terms are approximated by the Fourier basis under the pseudo-spectral method. The convergence and the stability of the numerical scheme are elaborated. Both models (fractional and non-fractional) are tested on some synthetic images and few real-world standard test images. The results on synthetic images are compared with those from the literature using Dice similarity index, Jaccard similarity index and BF score. Later the method is successfully applied on several medical images to classify the same.