New marker-based watershed algorithm

This paper proposes a novel automatic image-segmentation method which is an improvement to the marker-based watershed transform. A new marker-extracted approach is designed to extract the regional minima from the low frequency components of the gradients. The extracted minima constitute the binary marker image. Then the markers are imposed on the original gradients as its minima, and suppress its all intrinsic minima. Finally, the watershed algorithm is applied to the modified gradients to partition the image. Across a variety of image types, it is proven that this new method can obtain meaningful and homogeneous regions with accurate, consecutive and one-pixel wide boundary. Compared with other methods, this system requires fewer computations and simpler parameters and can more efficiently reduce the over-segmentation of the watershed algorithm.