Unsupervised image segmentation using triplet Markov fields

Hidden Markov fields (HMF) models are widely applied to various problems arising in image processing. In these models, the hidden process of interest X is a Markov field and must be estimated from its observable noisy version Y. The success of HMF is mainly due to the fact that the conditional probability distribution of the hidden process with respect to the observed one remains Markovian, which facilitates different processing strategies such as Bayesian restoration. HMF have been recently generalized to ‘‘pairwise’’ Markov fields (PMF), which offer similar processing advantages and superior modeling capabilities. In PMF one directly assumes the Markovianity of the pair (X,Y). Afterwards, ‘‘triplet’’ Markov fields (TMF), in which the distribution of the pair (X,Y) is the marginal distribution of a Markov field (X,U,Y), where U is an auxiliary process, have been proposed and still allow restoration processing. The aim of this paper is to propose a new parameter estimation method adapted to TMF, and to study the corresponding unsupervised image segmentation methods. The latter are validated via experiments and real image processing. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.