Contours
• Contours are said to be a curve that simply joins all the continuous points, along the
boundary, having the same color or intensity.
• Contours can be defined as the curves or outlines that represent the boundaries of objects
or shapes within an image. These curves join all the continuous points (along the
boundary) having the same color or intensity, highlighting the structural properties of
objects and providing a way to extract and represent shape information from images.
• Contours are useful when working with grayscale or binary images where objects are
clearly distinguished from the background based on variations in brightness or color.
• Even with simple images we transform it into grayscale or binary first to detect contours in
a simple way.
E(C) = E internal (C) + E external (C)
→ E external (C)
→ E internal (C)
Image segmentation
• Image segmentation is one of the key computer vision tasks, it separates
objects, boundaries, or structures within the image for more meaningful
analysis.
• Image segmentation plays an important role in extracting meaningful inf
ormation from images, enabling computers to perceive and understand visual
data in a manner that humans understand, view, and perceive.
• It involves partitioning a digital image into multiple segments (regions or
objects) to simplify and analyze an image by separating it into meaningful co
mponents, which makes the image processing more efficient by focusing on
specific regions of interest.
A typical image segmentation task goes through the following steps:
• Groups pixels in an image based on shared characteristics like colour,
intensity, or texture.
• Assigns a label to each pixel, indicating its belonging to a specific segment
or object.
• The resulting output is a segmented image, often visualized as a mask or
overlay highlighting the different segments.
Image segmentation
Attributes
extracted from
images
Applications of Image segmentation
• Autonomous Vehicles: Image segmentation helps autonomous vehicles in identifying and
segmenting objects like real time road lane detections, vehicles, pedestrians, traffic signs for safe
navigation.
• Medical Imaging Analysis: Image segmentation used for segmenting organs, tumours and other
anatomical structures from medical images like X-Rays, MRIs, and CT Scans, helps in diagnosis
and treatment planning.
• Satellite Image Analysis: Used in analysing satellite images for landcover classification, urban
planning, and environmental changes.
• Smart Agriculture: Image segmentation methods are used by farmers and agronomists for crop
health monitoring, estimating yield and detect plant diseases from images and videos.
• Industrial Inspection: Image segmentation helps in manufacturing process for quality control,
detecting defects in products.
The algorithm will categorize the items into k groups or clusters of
similarity. To calculate that similarity, we will use the Euclidean
distance as a measurement.
• First, we randomly initialize k points, called means or cluster
centroids.
• We categorize each item to its closest mean, and we update the
mean’s coordinates, which are the averages of the items
categorized in that cluster so far.
• We repeat the process for a given number of iterations and at the
end, we have our clusters.
Region Based Segmentation
• Edges and thresholds sometimes do not give good results for
segmentation.
• Region based segmentation is based on the connectivity of the
similar pixels in a region
• There are two main approaches to region based segmentation :
region growing and region splitting
Region growing method
Region growing method
Thank you!
