A14 - Color Image Segmentation

In today's era, a wide selection of "high-technology" imaging tools have come to life. One can choose from the sleek point-and-shoot cameras, to the high resolution DSLR's and the compact built-in high megapixel cellphone cameras. With all these complicated and expensive tools, we only have one simple ultimate goal. It is just to capture a scene or an important moment in our lives. A pretty simple idea right?

The images we capture can always be separated into two parts, the scene or object of our interest and the background. Sometimes the background is not as interesting as the object/scene but we have no choice but to take them also. That's where image segmentation enters. We can use this method to separate the object from the not-so-interesting background. If you have been following my blog, separating a region of interest (ROI) from the background is not a new idea. And it was always done using grayscale images. But many objects have intrinsic colors similar to the background, thus doing segmentation in grayscale world will definitely fail. In this blog post, I'll show you two techniques, the parametric and non-parametric segmentation, of separating a colored image from a background.