Textured Image Segmentation Based on Spatial Dependence using a Markov Random Field Model

Image segmentation is a primary step in many computer vision tasks. Although many segmentation methods have been proposed in the last decades, there is no generic method that can be applied in a great variety of images. This work presents a new image segmentation method using texture features extracted by wavelet transforms combined with spatial dependence modeled by a Markov random field (MRF). The method initially produces a coarse segmentation, which is refined through a relaxation method based on a new energy function. A set of textured images is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.