Segmenting and representing background in color images

This research addresses the issue of automatically segmenting color images into foreground (F) and background (B) regions with the assumption that background regions are relatively smooth but may have gradually varying colors or be slightly textured. A multi-level segmentation scheme is used that involves color clustering, unsupervised segmentation using MDL (minimum description length) principle, edge-based F/B separation, integrated initial F/B segmentation, background modeling, and final F/B separation. The approach has been tested on more than 100 images. Some of the experimental results are presented in this paper. © 1996 IEEE.