Noise modeling for smoothing the colour histogram

In this paper we present a segmentation algorithm for colour images that uses the watershed algorithm to segment either the 2D or the 3D colour histogram of an image. For compliance with the way humans perceive colour, this segmentation has to take place in a perceptually uniform colour space like the Luv space. To avoid oversegmentation, the watershed algorithm has to be applied to a smoothed out histogram. The noise, however, is inhomogeneous in the Luv space and we present here the noise analysis for this space based on assumptions that are experimentally justified.