A novel merging method in watershed segmentation"

The watershed transformation is the primary tool of Mathematical Morphology for image segmentation. However, the resulting image often appears oversegmented into a large number of tiny regions (basins), most of which are not significant in the problem of domain. In this paper, a method for removing non significant basins is presented. The notions of relative significance and intrinsic significance are introduced to restrict the merging of a basin to a number of suitably selected adjacent basins. Such a selection allows one to obtain a segmented image perceptually close to the original image. The good performance of the method is shown for the case of astronomic images.