Fast image segmentation for some machine vision applications

This paper describes the use of an image contrast measure for producing binary segmentations of images in a certain class of applications. This method is well-suited for fast pipeline implementations, because the contrast measure uses only two local features in the image. To eliminate segmentation noise, we post-process the segmentations using binary morphological operations. This method has been applied to three different microelectronics inspection problems, with consistently good results, and experimental results from each of these applications are presented here. Also, we discuss this technique in terms of the theory of polynomial classifiers.