On the Regularization of the Watershed Transform

Publisher Summary The watershed transform is one of the most popular judging from the great diversity of applications in which the method has been successfully applied. Since its introduction, various formulations of the watershed transform have appeared, providing elegant descriptions, revealing its properties, and resolving some difficulties. Since its origins, numerical image processing has developed along three main axes: (1) filtering theory and scale-space analysis, which corresponds to a robust framework for signal characterization, (2) segmentation for a precise identification of the shapes present in a scene, and (3) symbolic representations that seek to numerically restore a description as close as possible to our own vision. With the flat zones approach, the watershed transform is a fully automatic and parameter-free procedure. The most efficient computation method of the watershed transform is based on the hierarchical queues of pixels. This has two major benefits: first, it allows work on a narrow band near the lakes and second, it avoids a threshold by threshold processing.

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