Automatic quick-shift method for color image segmentation

This paper develops a segmentation method using an automatic quick-shift method based on illumination invariant representation of color images. The proposed method segments images into homogeneous regions by applying the quick-shift method with initial parameters, and then automatically gets the final segmented image by changing the quick-shift parameters values. This method is valid for large size images. A quantization process is applied to the invariant image to be used as a reference image. Changing parameters values in iterations instead of using a specific value made the proposed algorithm flexible and robust against different image characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed method for a variety of images including different objects of metals and dielectrics are examined in experiments by using our color imaging system.