A Contour-Based Part Segmentation Algorithm

Mohammed BENNAMOUN, Boualem BOASHASH

Summary :

Within the framework of a previously proposed vision system, a new part-segmentation algorithm, that breaks an object defined by its contour into its constituent parts, is presented. The contour is assumed to be obtained using an edge detector. This decomposition is achieved in two stages. The first stage is a preprocessing step which consists of extracting the convex dominant points (CDPs) of the contour. For this aim, we present a new technique which relaxes the compromise that exists in most classical methods for the selection of the width of the Gaussian filter. In the subsequent stage, the extracted CDPs are used to break the object into convex parts. This is performed as follows: among all the points of the contour only the CDPs are moved along their normals nutil they touch another moving CDP or a point on the contour. The results show that this part-segmentation algorithm is invariant to transformations such as rotation, scaling and shift in position of the object, which is very important for object recognition. The algorithm has been tested on many object contours, with and without noise and the advantages of the algorithm are listed in this paper. Our results are visually similar to a human intuitive decomposition of objects into their parts.

• Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals Vol.E80-A No.8 pp.1516-1521
• Publication Date: 1997/08/25
• Category: Image Theory

Authors

Mohammed BENNAMOUN
Boualem BOASHASH

Keyword

pattern recognition,  vision system,  part-segmentation,  parameter selection,  edge detection,  dominant points,  convex point,  Gaussian filter,  invariance.