An efficient watershed segmentation algorithm suitable for parallel implementation

An important aspect of designing a parallel algorithm is exploitation of the data locality for minimization of the communication overhead. We propose a reformulation of a global image operation called the watershed transformation. The method is one of the various approaches for image segmentation and works by labeling connected components. Both serial and parallel programming models are presented and evaluated when running on SUN and DEC Alpha AXP workstations, and a Cray T3D, respectively.