Fuzzy integral based region merging for watershed image segmentation

A fuzzy integral based region merging algorithm is presented to deal with the issue of oversegmentation due to the watershed transform. The algorithms integrates region and edge features together using a fuzzy logic based fusion method. Firstly, preprocessing and watershed segmentation are performed on the image. Depending on the complexity of the image content the segmentation process may produce many more regions than what are really expected to exist in the image. To reduce the number of regions that results due to oversegmentation, a fusion process is applied to these regions recursively according to the principle of the maximum fuzzy integral. After transferring these features to memberships that reflect the degree that a given region to belong to its neighboring regions, an integration (fusion) scheme is used to compute a fuzzy integral based on which a decision is made with respect to the region merging. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach it has been applied to real images such as MRI and natural images