Information-theoretic active polygons for unsupervised texture segmentation

Curve evolution models used in image segmentation and based on image region information usually utilize simple statistics such as means and variances hence can not account for higher order nature of the textural characteristics of image regions. In addition the object delineation by active contour methods results in a contour representation which still requires a substantial amount of data to be stored for subsequent multimedia applications such as visual information retrieval from databases. Polygonal approximations of the extracted continuous curves are required to reduce the amount of data since polygons are powerful approximators of shapes for use in later recognition stages such as shape matching and coding. The key contribution of this paper is the development of a new active contour model which nicely ties the desirable polygonal representation of an object directly to the image segmentation process. This model can robustly capture texture boundaries by way of higher-order statistics of the data and using an information-theoretic measure and with its nature of the ordinary differential equations. This new variational texture segmentation model is unsupervised since no prior knowledge on the textural properties of image regions is used. Another contribution in this sequel is a new polygon regularizer algorithm which uses electrostatics principles. This is a global regularizer and is more consistent than a local polygon regularization in preserving local features such as corners.