Watershed from propagated markers based on morphological hierarchical segmentation and graph matching

Watershed from propagated markers is a generic method to interactive segmentation of objects in image sequences, given by the combination of classical watershed from markers technique to motion estimation. The mask of segmentation, given by the segmentation of the object in the previous frame, is the main parameter to compute a set of markers to segment the same objects in the current frame. This paper introduces a new version of the watershed from propagated markers. In this proposal, the set of markers and its associated model graph are constructed in function of the mask of segmentation. The input graph is constructed given by the hierarchical segmentation of the next frame. The graph matching between the model graph and the input graph provides a pre-segmentation mask that will be used to compute the initial markers to the next frame. Experiments were done to illustrate the performance of the new version and its comparison to methods found in the literature and to previous versions of the watershed from propagated markers.