New topological operators for segmentation

In this paper, we propose an original method to segment bi-class images into regions. It is based on the use of low-level operators and works automatically, without any threshold or size criteria. This method is purely topological. We define a topology for grey-level images, called section topology, and two basic topological notions, the topological numbers and the topological values. We propose four fundamental operators built with these notions. Each of them consists of a simple iterative process which selectively modifies the section topology of an image in order to segment it.