Salient level lines selection using the Mumford-Shah functional

Many methods relying on the morphological notion of shapes, (i.e., connected components of level sets) have been proved to be very useful for pattern analysis and recognition. Selecting meaningful level lines (boundaries of level sets) yields to simplify images while preserving salient structures. Many image simplification and/or segmentation methods are driven by the optimization of an energy functional, for instance the Mumford-Shah functional. In this article, we propose an efficient shape-based morphological filtering that very quickly compute to a locally (subordinated to the tree of shapes) optimal solution of the piecewise-constant Mumford-Shah functional. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency, usefulness, and robustness of our method, when applied to image simplification, pre-segmentation, and detection of affine regions with viewpoint changes.