Abstract. A new type of range image segmentation method is introduced. The image segmentation is based on a recursive adaptive regression model prediction for detecting range image step discontinuities which are present at object face borders. Border pixels are detected in two perpendicular directions and detection results are combined together. Two predictors in each direction use identical contextual information from the pixel's neighbourhood and they mutually compete for the most optimal discontinuity detection. The method suggested can be successfully applied also to other image segmentation applications, e.g. panchromatic or multispectral image data, etc.
IntroductionSegmentation is a fundamental process affecting the overall performance of a machine vision system. Range image segmentation is a crucial part of autonomous navigation systems and as such it has been an active research area for past fifteen years. Segmentation of a range image should partion this image into meaningful patches representing single objects faces, but the task is complicated with outliers resulting from a sensing operation and corrupting boundary between distinct shapes. Optimal segmentation algorithm should be stable, accurate and numerically efficient. There are many segmentation Mgorithms published in computer vision literature and a number of good survey articles [1],[10] is available. However their mutual comparison is very difficult because of lack of sound experimental evaluation results. A rare exception is results published in [7] together with experinaental data available on their Internet server. These data and results are used also for our Mgorithm evaluation. The common approaches to solve the range image segmentation problem are region growing based algorithms [7], [2] where single regions are formed by iteratively growing from seed regions, splitand-merge, clustering (e.g. clustering in a fitted planes parameter space [4]), and edge based techniques [12]. Region growing and split-and-merge algorithms present the problem that they have to deal with different threshold values that are difficult to obtain (see [7]) and depend on an application. Clustering algorithms suffer usually less influence from this kind of problem, although other problems exist. Current segmentation algorithms most often miss small regions and perform poorly when the required region precision is high. Experiments in