Paving the Way for Image Understanding: A New Kind of Image Decomposition Is Desired

In this paper we present an unconventional image segmentation approach which is devised to meet the requirements of image understanding and pattern recognition tasks. Generally image understanding assumes interplay of two sub-processes: image information content discovery and image information content interpretation. Despite of its widespread use, the notion of “image information content” is still ill defined, intuitive, and ambiguous. Most often, it is used in the Shannon’s sense, which means information content assessment averaged over the whole signal ensemble. Humans, however, rarely resort to such estimates. They are very effective in decomposing images into their meaningful constituents and focusing attention to the perceptually relevant image parts. We posit that following the latest findings in human attention vision studies and the concepts of Kolmogorov’s complexity theory an unorthodox segmentation approach can be proposed that provides effective image decomposition to information preserving image fragments well suited for subsequent image interpretation. We provide some illustrative examples, demonstrating effectiveness of this approach.