Image Segmentation - Compression-based Methods

Compression-based Methods

Compression based methods postulate that the optimal segmentation is the one that minimizes, over all possible segmentations, the coding length of the data. The connection between these two concepts is that segmentation tries to find patterns in an image and any regularity in the image can be used to compress it. The method describes each segment by its texture and boundary shape. Each of these components is modeled by a probability distribution function and its coding length is computed as follows:

1. The boundary encoding leverages the fact that regions in natural images tend to have a smooth contour. This prior is used by Huffman coding to encode the difference chain code of the contours in an image. Thus, the smoother a boundary is, the shorter coding length it attains.
2. Texture is encoded by lossy compression in a way similar to minimum description length (MDL) principle, but here the length of the data given the model is approximated by the number of samples times the entropy of the model. The texture in each region is modeled by a multivariate normal distribution whose entropy has closed form expression. An interesting property of this model is that the estimated entropy bounds the true entropy of the data from above. This is because among all distributions with a given mean and covariance, normal distribution has the largest entropy. Thus, the true coding length cannot be more than what the algorithm tries to minimize.

For any given segmentation of an image, this scheme yields the number of bits required to encode that image based on the given segmentation. Thus, among all possible segmentations of an image, the goal is to find the segmentation which produces the shortest coding length. This can be achieved by a simple agglomerative clustering method. The distortion in the lossy compression determines the coarseness of the segmentation and its optimal value may differ for each image. This parameter can be estimated heuristically from the contrast of textures in an image. For example, when the textures in an image are similar, such as in camouflage images, stronger sensitivity and thus lower quantization is required.