Automatic threshold determination of centroid-linkage region growing by MPEG-7 dominant color descriptors

The emerging MPEG-7 standard embodies a visual descriptor that is associated with the dominant colors of an image. A threshold adaptation method for region based image and video segmentation that takes advantage of the MPEG-7 dominant color descriptor is presented. This method enables assignment of region growing parameters without any low-level processing. In the standard, it is proposed that the dominant colors be extracted by clustering of color histograms. This property is used to determine color homogeneity that is formulated into the Lorentzian-based color distance norm and corresponding thresholds. The proposed algorithm is compared with other region growing algorithms, and results show that the threshold adaptation performs faster and more robustly.