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The weighted gradient: A color image gradient applied to morphological segmentation

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 11, pages 53–63 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for color gradient computation applied to morphological segmentation of color images. The weighted gradient (with weights estimated automatically), proposed in this paper, applied in conjunction with the watershed from markers technique, provides excelent segmentation results, according to a subjective visual criterion. The weighted gradient is computed by linear combination of the gradients from each band of an image under the IHS color space model. The weights to each gradient are estimated by a systematic method that computes the similarity between the image to compute the gradient and an ”ideal image”, whose histogram has an uniform distribution. Several experiments were done in order to compare the segmentation results provided by the weighted gradient to the results provided by other color space metrics, also according to a subjective criterion, and such comparison is present in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, State University of Maringá, Av. Colombo, 5790, Zona 7

    Franklin César Flores & Airton Marco Polidório

  2. Zip 13081-970, Maringá, PR, Brazil

    Franklin César Flores & Airton Marco Polidório

  3. Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation School of Electrical and Computing Engineering, State University of Campinas, P.O. Box 6101, Zip 13083-852, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Franklin César Flores & Roberto de Alencar Lotufo

Authors
  1. Franklin César Flores
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  2. Airton Marco Polidório
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  3. Roberto de Alencar Lotufo
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Flores, F.C., Polidório, A.M. & Lotufo, R.d.A. The weighted gradient: A color image gradient applied to morphological segmentation. J Braz Comp Soc 11, 53–63 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192382

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