Polymorphic grouping for image segmentation

The paper describes a new approach to image segmentation. It accepts the inherent deficiencies occuring when extracting low-level features and when dealing with the complexity of real scenes. Image segmentation therefore is understood as deriving a rich symbolic description useful for tasks such as stereo or object recognition in outdoor scenes. The approach is based on a polymorphic scheme for simultaneously extracting points, lines and segments in a topologically consistent manner, together with their mutual relations derived from the feature adjacency graph (FAG) thereby performing several grouping steps which gradually use more and more specific domain knowledge to achieve an optimal image description. The heart of the approach is (1) a detailed analysis of the FAG and (2) a robust estimation for validating the found geometric hypotheses. The analysis of the FAG, derived from the exoskeleton of the features, allows to detect inconsistencies of the extracted features with the ideal image model, a cell-complex. The FAG is used for finding hypotheses about incidence relations and geometric hypotheses, such as collinearity or parallelity, also between non-neighbored points and lines. The M-type robust estimation is used for simultaneously eliminating wrong hypotheses on geometric relationships. It uses a new argument for the weighting function