Psychovisually-based multiresolution image segmentation

Psychophysical studies have shown that there are three image components of distinct perceptual significance to human observers: strong edges, smooth regions, and textured or detailed regions. A psychophysical test was performed to evaluate the perceptual role of each region and a segmentation algorithm was developed to segment an image into the three regions. The segmentation algorithm identifies blocks of an image as belonging to one of the perceptual regions by analyzing high frequency coefficients of a 3-level hierarchical subband/wavelet decomposition. The segmentation algorithm performs well on a wide range of image content, including natural images and mixed images containing text, graphics, and natural scenes.