A New Segmentation Method using Watersheds on Grey Level Images

Segmentation is one of the most challenging tasks in image processing as it requires to some extent a semantic understanding of the image. The morphological segmentation paradigm, based on the watershed transform and markers has been extremely successful, both for interactive as for automatic segmentation. Though many algorithms were proposed for watersheds in the literature, but most of them are based on binary images, for finding water catchments basins. In the present study a new method of finding watersheds on grey level image is proposed on 5X5 and 3X3 masks. To count the number of watersheds on grey levels, a new scheme is proposed for selecting the height of the peak points from where water starts falling, to the central point. The algorithm is applied on human images and textures and a good segmentation is resulted. The present study compares the proposed segmentation scheme with number of watersheds taken into account on different mask sizes.