Segmentation of soil section images using connected operators

Segmentation of soil section images is an important task for automating the measurement of the grains´ properties as well as for detecting and recognizing objects in the soil, important for its bioecological quality. We apply several types of morphological systems to watershed-based segmentation of soil section images. We use efficient connected operators such as reconstruction open-closing and area open-closing as well as some relatively new operators, the levelings, for image denoising, simplification and feature/marker extraction. Further, we introduce an improvement of the reconstruction operators used in segmentation, based on a generalized multiscale connectivity analysis