From Pixels to Regions: Hierarchical Segmentation Pre-Processing for Image Analysis

The Hierarchical Image Segmentation (HSEG) software produces a set of hierarchically related segmentations of imagery data. These hierarchically related segmentations are at several levels of detail in which the coarser segmentations can be produced from the finer resolution segmentations by selective merging of regions. The segmentation hierarchies organize image data in a manner that makes the image's information content more accessible for analysis by enabling region-based analysis. In addition, the segmentation hierarchies provide additional analysis clues through the behavior of the image region characteristics over several levels of segmentation detail. Following a brief overview of HSEG, its recursive and parallel implementations, and a companion HSEGViewer program, a number of applications will be discussed.