Bilateral filter based mixture model for image segmentation

This paper introduces a bilateral filtering based mixture model for image segmentation. The mixture model uses Markov Random Field (MRF) to incorporate spatial relationship among neighboring pixels into the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) in order to perform a segmentation that is robust against noise and other environmental factors. The bilateral filtering is used to smooth the posterior probability map as part of the MRF used. The advantage of the proposed model is its simplified structure so that the Expectation Maximization algorithm can be directly applied to the log-likelihood function to compute the optimum parameters of the mixture model. The method has been extensively tested on synthetic and natural images and compared with some of the state-of-the-arts algorithms currently available. The experimental results show that the proposed method is comparable to the other methods in terms of accuracy and quality and simpler in terms of implementation.