Context-free Marker-controlled Watershed Transform for Over-segmentation Reduction

A modified watershed transform is proposed which is context-free marker-controlled and minima imposition-free to reduce the over-segmentation and to speedup the transform. In contrast to the conventional methods in which a priori knowledge, such as flat zones, zones of homogeneous texture, and morphological distance, is required for marker extraction, context-free marker extraction is proposed by using the attention operator based on the GST (generalized symmetry transform). By using the context-free marker, the proposed watershed transform exploit marker-constrained labeling to speedup the computation and to reduce the over-segmentation by eliminating the unnecessary geodesic reconstruction such as the minima imposition and thereby eliminating the necessity of the post-processing of region merging. The simulation results show that the proposed method can extract context-free markers inside the objects from the complex background that includes multiple objects and efficiently reduces over-segmentation and computation time.