Synergism in low level vision

Guiding image segmentation with edge information is an often employed strategy in low level computer vision. To improve the trade-off between the sensitivity of homogeneous region delineation and the over-segmentation on of the image, we have incorporated a recently proposed edge magnitude/confidence map into a color image segmenter based on the mean shift procedure. The new method can recover regions with weak but sharp boundaries and thus can provide a more accurate input for high level interpretation modules. The edge detection and image segmentation (EDISON) system, available for download, implements the proposed technique and provides a complete toolbox for discontinuity preserving filtering, segmentation and edge detection.