Watershed Cuts: Thinnings, Shortest Path Forests, and Topological Watersheds

We recently introduced the watershed cuts, a notion of watershed in edge-weighted graphs. In this paper, our main contribution is a thinning paradigm from which we derive three algorithmic watershed cut strategies: the first one is well suited to parallel implementations, the second one leads to a flexible linear-time sequential implementation whereas the third one links the watershed cuts and the popular flooding algorithms. We state that watershed cuts preserve a notion of contrast, called connection value, on which are (implicitly) based several morphological region merging methods. We also establish the links and differences between watershed cuts, minimum spanning forests, shortest-path forests and topological watersheds. Finally, we present illsutrations of the proposed framework to the segmentation of artwork surfaces and diffusion tensor images.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PAMI
• Authors: Jean Cousty, Gilles Bertrand, Laurent Najman, Michel Couprie
• Keywords: Intelligent Agents, Minimum Spanning Forests, PAMI 2010, Popular Flooding Algorithms, Watershed Cuts