Segmentation of color images via reversible jump MCMC sampling

Reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) is a recent method which makes it possible to construct reversible Markov chain samplers that jump between parameter subspaces of different dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a new RJMCMC sampler for multivariate Gaussian mixture identification and we apply it to color image segmentation. For this purpose, we consider a first order Markov random field (MRF) model where the singleton energies derive from a multivariate Gaussian distribution and second order potentials favor similar classes in neighboring pixels. The proposed algorithm finds the most likely number of classes, their associated model parameters and generates a segmentation of the image by classifying the pixels into these classes. The estimation is done according to the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) criterion. The algorithm has been validated on a database of real images with human segmented ground truth. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.