Unsupervised segmentation of Markov random field modeled textured images using selectionist relaxation

Among the existing texture segmentation methods, those relying on Markov random fields have retained substantial interest and have proved to be very efficient in supervised mode. The use of Markov random fields in unsupervised mode is, however, hampered by the parameter estimation problem. The recent solutions proposed to overcome this difficulty rely on assumptions about the shapes of the textured regions or about the number of textures in the input image that may not be satisfied in practice. In this paper, an evolutionary approach, selectionist relaxation, is proposed as a solution to the problem of segmenting Markov random field modeled textures in unsupervised mode. In selectionist relaxation, the computation is distributed among a population of units that iteratively evolves according to simple and local evolutionary rules. A unit is an association between a label and a texture parameter vector. The units whose likelihood is high are allowed to spread over the image and to replace the units that receive lower support from the data. Consequently, some labels are growing while others are eliminated. Starting with an initial random population, this evolutionary process eventually results in a stable labelization of the image, which is taken as the segmentation. In this work, the generalized Ising model is used to represent textured data. Because of the awkward nature of the partition function in this model, a high-temperature approximation is introduced to allow the evaluation of unit likelihoods. Experimental results on images containing various synthetic and natural textures are reported