Visible colour difference-based quantitative evaluation of colour segmentation

The authors present the use of visible colour difference in a new quantitative evaluation scheme for colour segmentation. To avoid directly evaluating the subjectively perceived quality of colour segmentation, two objective visual quantities, the quantity of missing boundaries and the quantity of fake boundaries, are considered. To explore how missing boundaries and fake boundaries affect the perceived quality of colour segmentation, a few visual rating experiments are made. On the other hand, to fit for humans´ visual perception on colour difference, the visible colour difference is defined. Based on the experiments and the visible colour difference, two measures, named intra-region visual error and inter-region visual error, are designed to estimate the degrees of missing boundaries and fake boundaries, respectively. With these two measures, a complete scheme for the evaluation of colour segmentation is proposed. The simulation results demonstrate that this new scheme may evaluate segmentation results without any ground truth, and could help the automatic selection of parameter settings for a given segmentation algorithm