Principal Color and its Application to Color Image Segmentation

Color image segmentation is a primitive operation in many image processing and computer vision applications. accordingly, there exist numerous segmentation approaches in the literature, which might be misleading for a researcher who is looking for a practical algorithm. while many researchers are still using the tools which belong to the old color space paradigm, there is evidence in the research established in the eighties that a proper descriptor of color vectors should act locally in the color domain. in this paper, these results are used to propose a new color image segmentation method. the proposed method searches for the principal colors, defined as the intersections of the cylindrical representations of homogeneous blocks of the given image. as such, rather than using the noisy individual pixels, which may contain many outliers, the proposed method uses the linear representation of homogeneous blocks of the image. the paper includes comprehensive mathematical discussion of the proposed method and experimental results to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.