Connected operators are an important tool for the analysis of greyscale images. In extending them to colour and other vector images there are a number of issues that must be addressed, including the definition of extrema, region merging criterion and the preservation of idempotence. This paper reviews the recently proposed approaches to these problems and considers some of the choices which must be made in the design of effective colour connective operators. An evaluation of the noise reduction performance resulting from these choices is presented. The use of the colour connected sieves in conjunction with the watershed transform for image segmentation is also investigated.
Adrian N. Evans, David Gimenez