A novel method for color image segmentation is proposed in this paper. The method is based on the segmentation of each color plane independently using a watershed based thresholding of the plane histograms. The segmentation maps obtained for each color plane are fused together according to a fusion operator taking into account a concordance of the labels of each segmentation map. This operator produces a fused segmentation map containing labeled and unlabeled pixels which is used as an image of seeds for a region growing method : the color watershed. The color watershed produces the final segmentation of the initial image. This segmentation scheme is experimented using several types of medical images and results in a fast and robust segmentation.
O. Lezoray, H. Cardot, "Histogram and Watershed Based Segmentation of Color Images" in Proc. IS&T CGIV 2002 First European Conf. on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision, 2002, pp 358 - 362, https://doi.org/10.2352/CGIV.2002.1.1.art00075