Region-based perceptual grouping: a cooperative approach based on the Dempster-Shafer theory

As segmentation step does not allow recovering semantic objects, perceptual grouping is often used to overcome segmentation's lacks. This refers to the ability of human visual system to impose structure and regularity over signal-based data. Gestalt psychologists have exhibited some properties which seem to be at work for perceptual grouping and some implementations have been proposed by computer vision. However, few of these works model the use of several properties in order to trigger a grouping, even if it can lead to an increase in robustness. We propose a cooperative approach for perceptual grouping by combining the influence of several Gestalt properties for each hypothesis. We make use of Dempster-Shafer formalism, as it can prevent conflicting hypotheses from jamming the grouping process.