Bayesian morphology: Fast unsupervised Bayesian image analysis

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Forbes, F; Raftery, AE
• 署名单位: University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• 发表日期: 1999
• 页码: 555-568
• 关键词: random-field images; statistical-analysis; restoration; relaxation

摘要

We consider the problems of image segmentation and classification, and image restoration when the true image is made up of a small number of (unordered) colors. Our emphasis is on both performance and speed; speed has become increasingly important for analyzing large images and multispectral images with many bands, processing large image databases, real-time or near realtime image analysis, and the online analysis of video. Bayesian image analysis provides an elegant solution to these problems, but it is computationally expensive, and the solutions it provides may be sensitive to unrealistic global properties of the models on which it is based. The ICM algorithm is faster and based on the local properties of the models underlying Bayesian image analysis, parameter estimation is performed iteratively via pseudolikelihood. Mathematical morphology is faster again and is widely considered to perform well, but lacks a statistical basis; method selection (analogous to parameter estimation) is done in a rather ad hoc manner. We propose Bayesian morphology a synthesis of these methods that attempts to combine the speed of mathematical morphology with the principled statistical basis of ICM. The key observation is that when the original image is discrete (or if an initial segmentation has been carried out), then, assuming a Ports model for the true scene and channel transmission noise, (1) the ICM algorithm is equivalent to a form of mathematical morphology and (2) the segmentation is insensitive to the precise values of the model parameters, Unlike in standard Bayesian images analysis and ICM, it is feasible to do maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters in this setting. For gray-level or multispectral images, we propose an initial segmentation based on the Ehl algorithm for a mixture model of the marginal distribution of the pixels. The resulting algorithm is much faster than ICM, with gains that increase for more bands and larger images, and has good performance in experiments acid for real examples.