Anti-geometric diffusion for adaptive thresholding and segmentation

In this paper, we present a novel adaptive thresholding technique based upon an anisotropic diffusionmodel, whichmay be referred to as the anti-geometric heat flow. In contrast to its more popular counterparts (such as the geometric heat flow) which diffuse parallel to image edges, this model diffuses perpendicular to image edges, yielding surfaces which are naturally suited for adaptive thresholding and segmentation. While it is possible to apply this diffusion for a fixed amount of time to detect features, we discuss how to detect features during the diffusion process, thus avoidingmuch of the arbitrarinessassociatedwith choosinga single scale (and makes the most notorious problem associated with anisotropic diffusion methods, namely "when do you stop?" a moot point). We will demonstrate the perfonnance of this technique on both synthetic and real images, showing applications to thresholding written text and segmentationof mehcal images and scenes.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICIP
• Authors: Siddharth Manay, Anthony J. Yezzi
• Keywords: Adaptive Thresholding Technique, Anisotropic Diffusion Methods, Geometric Heat Flow, ICIP 2001, Image Processing