Image segmentation by region-contour cooperation as a basis for efficient coding scheme

This paper describes a method of image coding based on contour detection and region-growing procedure. Contour detection allows the most evident frontiers of homogeneous regions to be found. The region-growing procedure serves to close contours and to obtain more precise segmentation. The goal of this segmentation is to obtain regions with borders which are easy to code. So the split-and-merge procedure and quad-tree representation are used, that gives a more regular closure of contours, than usual contour-wise methods. The particularity of the method is the choice of growing centers. They are placed on the skeleton of non-closed regions and used in split-and-merge procedure of region growing. The centers placement scheme aims to obtain a uniform centers distribution inside a contour which results in approximately constant speed of growing.