STRUCTURE, SCALE-SPACE AND DECAY OF OTSU’S THRESHOLD IN IMAGES FOR FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND DISCRIMINATION

Rahul Walia, Ray Jarvis

2009

Abstract

A method for gauging the appropriate scale for foreground-background discrimination in Scale-Space theory is presented. Otsu’s Threshold (OT) is a statistical parameter generated from the first two moments of a histogram of a signal / image. In the current work a set of OT is derived from histograms of derivatives of image having Scale-Space representation. This set of OT, when plotted against corresponding scale, generates a Threshold Graph (TG). The TG undergoes an exponential decay, in the absence of foreground and exhibits inflection(s) in the presence of foreground. It is demonstrated, using synthetic and natural images, that the maxima of inflection indicate the scale and threshold (OT) appropriate to interface edges. The edges identified by thresholding at scale and threshold given by inflection of OT correspond to foreground-background interface edges. The histogram inherently imbeds the TG with underlying image signal parameters like background intensity range, pattern frequency, foreground-background intensity gradient, foreground size etc, making the method adaptable and deployable for unsupervised machine vision applications. Commutative, separable and symmetric properties of the Scale-Space representation of an image and its derivatives are preserved and computationally efficient implementations are available.

References

  1. Lindberg, T. Scale Space Theory in Computer Vision. Kluwer academic Publishers, Netherlands,. 1994.
  2. Otsu. N. A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC-9:62-66, Jan 1979.
  3. Witkin A. Scale-Space Filtering. Proc. Int. Joint Conf on artificial Intel, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1019-1021, 1981.
  4. Koenderink. J.J. The Structure of Images. Biological Cybernetics, vol 50, pp. 363-370,1984.
  5. Malik. J. and Perorna. P. Preattentive texture discrimination with early vision mechanisms. J. Opt Soc Am A.,7(5): 923-32,1990.
  6. Ren. X, Fowlkes. C and Malik. J. Figure/Ground Assignment in Natural Images. LNCS, Volume 3952-ECCV2006, pp 614-627, July 2006.
  7. Lin. K.C. Fast image thresholding by finding the zero(s) of the first derivative of between-class variance. Machine Vision and Applications (2003) 13: pp 254- 262.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Walia R. and Jarvis R. (2009). STRUCTURE, SCALE-SPACE AND DECAY OF OTSU’S THRESHOLD IN IMAGES FOR FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND DISCRIMINATION . In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2009) ISBN 978-989-8111-69-2, pages 120-128. DOI: 10.5220/0001755101200128


in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp09,
author={Rahul Walia and Ray Jarvis},
title={STRUCTURE, SCALE-SPACE AND DECAY OF OTSU’S THRESHOLD IN IMAGES FOR FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND DISCRIMINATION},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2009)},
year={2009},
pages={120-128},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001755101200128},
isbn={978-989-8111-69-2},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2009)
TI - STRUCTURE, SCALE-SPACE AND DECAY OF OTSU’S THRESHOLD IN IMAGES FOR FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND DISCRIMINATION
SN - 978-989-8111-69-2
AU - Walia R.
AU - Jarvis R.
PY - 2009
SP - 120
EP - 128
DO - 10.5220/0001755101200128