News from viscousland

Viscous closings have been presented at ISMM'02 as an e cient tool for regularizing the watershed lines in gray-scale images. We consider now the problem of reconnecting several edge portions of a same object. In the binary case, this is very nicely solved via the computation of the distance function to the grains: the downstream of the saddle points reconnects the grains, and is known as the perceptual graph. As a particular case, overlapping particles may be separated by computing the watershed line of the inverse distance function. This paper extends the approach to grey-tone images using the concept of viscous dilations. Finally, combinations of both viscous dilations and viscous closings are proposed for segmenting objects with dotted and irregular contours.