Image segmentation remains an important, but hard-to-solve, problem since it appears to be application dependent with usually no a priori information available regarding the image structure. Moreover, the increasing demands of image analysis tasks in terms of segmentation results' quality introduce the necessity of employing multiple cues for improving image segmentation results. In this paper, we attempt to incorporate cues such as intensity contrast, region size, and texture in the segmentation procedure and derive improved results compared to using individual cues separately. We emphasize on the overall segmentation procedure, and we propose efficient simplification operators and feature extraction schemes, capable of quantifying important characteristics, like geometrical complexity, rate of change in local contrast variations, and orientation, that eventually favor the final segmentation result. Based on the well-known morphological paradigm of watershed transform segmentatio...