Color-Image Segmentation

One of the biggest hurtles I'm encountering in my senior design project right now is separating the person from everything else. The paper I read today discusses that very problem in excruciating detail. Let me tell you, it's not as easy as I thought, but if my current idea fails, I might just fall back onto some of the concepts this paper discusses. This paper looks at separating objects from each other by looking at the problem from a classification and clustering point of view. In other words, it takes the values of the pixels and groups them together based on their similarities.

By itself, looking at color similarity can be very flawed. The same color can appear in several different part of the picture. Also, given different lighting, certain colors can appear as different colors that might show up elsewhere. In this case, you have different partitioning results in different lighting. In order to address this problem, the researchers in the paper look, not only to the RGB color values, but to the location of that value within the picture. The assumption is that if similar colors exist in close proximity, it is likely the same object. You also have to consider noise. With a single pixel being so tiny, it's not uncommon to have a single pixel be an abnormal color from its neighbors. To ensure correctness, they find "core" pixels. They do this simply by looking at the neighboring pixels, and see if a minimum number of neighboring pixels are similar enough to the chosen one. You then take those and cluster them based on both proximity and color value, and determine what is and isn't the same object.

The paper also include "fuzzy mode detection." I have to be honest with you. I do not know what the paper is talking about during this part. What is a "mode?" If I could answer that question, maybe I'd be able to follow this section of the paper better. Sorry guys.

Source:
Losson, O., Botte-Lecocq, C., & Macaire, L. (2008). Fuzzy mode enhancement and detection for color image segmentation. Journal on Image and Video Processing - Color in Image and Video Processing , 1-19.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362851.1453693&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=96602743&CFTOKEN=40588068