Geometrical and topological informations for MCMC based image segmentation

The image segmentation methods based on Markovian assumption consist in optimizing a Gibbs energy function which depends on the observation field and the segmented field. This energy function can be represented as a sum of potentials defined on cliques which are subsets of the grid of sites. The Potts model is the most commonly used to represent the segmented field. However, this model expressed just a potential on the classes for nearest neighbour pixels. In this paper, we propose the integration of global informations, like the size of a region, in the local potentials of the Gibbs energy. To extract these informations, we use a representation model well known in geometric modeling: the topological map. Results on synthetic and natural images are provided showing improvements in the obtained segmented fields.