International Journal of Research and Reviews in Computer Science (IJRRCS) 1576

Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2012, ISSN: 2079-2557

© Science Academy Publisher, United Kingdom
www.sciacademypublisher.com/journals/index.php/IJRRCS

Color Image Segmentation using Multi-thresholding Histogram

and Morphology

Soheil Zadi Moghaddam, Amirhassan Monadjemi, and Naser Nematbakhsh

Department of Computer Engineering, University of Isfahan, Iran
Email: soheilzmoghaddam@gmail.com, monadjemi@eng.ui.ac.ir, nemat@eng.ui.ac.ir

Abstract – Image segmentation is one of the key steps in many problem solving methods in image processing applications.
This paper addresses the image segmentation problem for content-based image retrieval applications. Our method is based on
multi-thresholding histogram in CIE L*a*b* color space and we have used average filter to discover the peaks of histogram.
An algorithm similar to morphology is used to merge the initial segments. We have used the Berkeley dataset to evaluate our
method and our result is compared with the results of methods provided by the Berkeley University.
Keywords – Image segmentation, Multi-threshold histogram, Morphology

1. Introduction combining the results, and 2) analyzing two or three

Image segmentation is a process of dividing an image into channels compositely.
different heterogeneous regions that do not overlap with each Image-domain based techniques exploit the pixel context
other. The goal of segmentation is to simplify and/or change interaction which increases computational complexity. The
the representation of an image into something that is more most common feature-space techniques gained their
meaningful and easier to analyze [1]. popularity through the adaptive k-means algorithm [15]-[16].
Image segmentation is one of the most important tasks in Most of these methods are parameterized with number of
image processing and is used in both gray images and color expected clusters. The categorization of segmentation
images. The gray images are used in domain-specific methods is shown in Figure 1.
applications such as medical sciences. Hence, most of the In [17], the images are converted to CIE L*u*v* color
segmentation techniques attend to the color images than the space and then the 3D histogram of the first two components
gray ones. is depicted and then the histogram is separated into different
The color and texture characteristics are the two main parts each containing one of the peaks.
basic features for the image segmentation process and the
former is more attended in previous works.
Multi-color histogram method is the one which is used
widely in color image segmentation process. We have used
this method in our approach with some changes.
Our paper is structured as follows: in section 2, we
provide related work. In section 3, we provide a summarized
discussion about color spaces. In section 4, we describe our
proposed segmentation method, followed by evaluation
results in section 5. Conclusion is given in section 6.

2. Related work
Although the research in this area has led to many
different image segmentation techniques presented in the
literature [2], no single algorithm can be considered good for
all applications and all images [3]. Segmentation methods
used for color images can be divided into two main
categories: image-domain based techniques and feature-space
based techniques. The former are further divided into pixel-
similarity based algorithms [4]-[6] and pixel-difference based
algorithms [7]-[9], and the latter are further divided into
clustering methods [10]-[12] and histogram multi-
thresholding [3],[13]-[14] which we have divided it into two
subcategories: 1) analyzing each channel independently and
Figure 1. Categorization of segmentation methods.
S.Z. Moghaddam et al. / IJRRCS, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 1576-1579, April 2012 1577

3. Color Spaces grow.

While there are many sources of information describing
color spaces, color models, like all mathematical
representations of physical phenomena, can be expressed in
many different ways, each with its advantages and
drawbacks. Different representations are useful for different
applications. Some of them are appropriate for human color
selection, and others do well in data processing applications.
Color spaces are a way to represent colors and are usually
three-dimensional spaces. The differences between color
spaces lie in the choice of the coordinate system. There are
many color spaces in the classical literatures, for example,
CIE L*a*b*, CIE L*u*v*, YCbCr, YpbPr, RGB, HSL, HSV,
CMYK, and so on EM [10-13]. The CIE L*a*b*, HSV, and
HIS color spaces are closely associated with the way of
human color perception.

4. Proposed Segmentation Method

We have employed the multi-thresholding histogram
technique for initial segmentation in each component of color
space. In this way, we examined the CIE L*a*b*, and HSV
colors spaces. However, due to the higher performance of
CIE L*a*b* color space in our investigation, we selected it as
our main color space in our proposed approach. Our method
consists of three steps: 1) specifying initial segments, 2)
growing regions using a method similar to morphology, and
3) merging the initial segments and generating the final
segments.

4.1. Specifying Initial Segments

First of all, images are converted to CIE L*a*b* space.
Due to the fact that histograms can intensively be noisy, the
boundaries of peaks are hardly recognizable. Hence, we
convolve a 9-pointing average filter with dc=0 on histogram.
The Equation (1) shows the formula of the applied filter.
(1)
Applying the mentioned filter, the boundaries of peaks in
histogram become clearer and more apparent which make it
easier to specify the peaks of histogram. Finally, the
histogram is partitioned regarding to the acquired peaks. In
other words, pixels of each component are partitioned into
several parts based on the pixels’ values. This partitioning is
applied to the image. A sample image with its partitioned
image in every three components of L*a*b* are shown in
figure 3. By overlapping the partitioned images of three
components, the initial segments of the main image are
acquired. For example, initial segments of the image in figure
3 are displayed in figure 4.
4.2. Growing Regions
In this step, every initial segment is divided into 5*5
squares. In each of the initial segments, squares that contain a
number of selected pixels more than a specific threshold will
be selected entirely. In other words, if the number of pixels,
that are common between a square and the respective
segment, exceeds from a beforehand identified threshold, the
region grows, if necessary, to encompass all space of the
square. Applying this process, each initial segment may
Figure 2. (a) Histogram of a sample image. (b) the same histogram in (a)
after applying the average filter.
4.3. Merging Initial Segments
The goal of this step is merging the initial segments to
generate the final segments. To do this, firstly, initial segment
are sorted based on their size. The extent of overlapping
pixels between the smallest initial segment and other
segments are calculated. If the maximum of overlapping
values exceeds from a specific threshold, then the smallest
initial segment merges with the one generated the maximum
value. This process is iterated for all other initial segments
from the smallest to the biggest one. Finally, the remained
segments represent the final segments.
5. Empirical Evaluation
5.1. Benchmarks
For our evaluation, we have used the Berkeley
Segmentation Dataset (BSDS) [18] which is consists of 300
natural images. In this dataset, each image is manually
segmented by different persons. Although the ground-truth
data is a diverse data collection, the produced human
segmentations are highly consistent and similar.
S.Z. Moghaddam et al. / IJRRCS, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 1576-1579, April 2012 1578

Figure 3. (a) a sample image. (b) segmented image in L* component. (c) segmented image in a* component. (d) segmented image in b* component.

Where α is a relative cost between R and P and F-measure

curve can be obtained by changing the algorithm parameters.

Table 1. For each segmentation Method the second column report the score
of the covering of ground-truth segments according to optimal image scale
(OIS) criteria
Method Aggregate F-measure
(OIS)
human 0.73
gPb-owt-ucm 0.64
Mean Shift 0.58
Felz-Hutt 0.58
Canny-owt-ucm 0.56
The proposed method 0.54
NCuts 0.53

We have implemented our algorithm in Matlab R2011b.

Figure 4. Initial segments of the sample image shown in figure 3.
5.2. Precision and recall measures
The precision recall is a well-accepted measure in image
segmentation, which considers two aspects of boundary
qualities: Precision is the fraction of detections that are true
positives rather than false positives, whereas recall is the
fraction of true positives that are detected, rather than missed.
A combination of these two quantities is defined as the -
measure in [19]
In our experiments, we report the quantity of Optimal Image
Scale (OIS) or aggregate F-measure on the dataset for the
best scale in each image which is presented in table 1.
The goal of our research is to discriminating objects that
are not similar to each other. In other words, we want to
cluster similar objects. Therefore, objects with similar
features are placed in the same segment. For example, all the
buffaloes in figure 3 are placed in one segment. Due to the
fact that in BSDS300 humans place each of the buffaloes in a
separate segment and we have evaluated our method using
this dataset, our proposed method owns lower performance
compared with the most of the other methods. However, our
method does well in aggregating similar objects in one
segment.
S.Z. Moghaddam et al. / IJRRCS, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 1576-1579, April 2012 1579

6. Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed a novel method for
segmenting an image into distinct dissimilar components.
Although our results do not show high performance, our
method is a promising approach for image segmentation, and
clustering similar objects efficiently.

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