Colour segmentation based on separate anisotropic diffusion of chromatic and achromatic channels

The paper presents a new technique for segmenting images only on the basis of colour information. It is shown how segmentation can benefit from splitt ing colour signals into chromatic and achromatic channels and separately sm oothing them through anisotropic diffusion. Operatively, this is accomplish ed through two independent diffusion processes: one involves only the chrom atic information, conveniently embedded in a complex function, while the ot her affects the lightness information. The results of the two diffusions ar e separately segmented by k-means clustering techniques and their combinati on yields the final image partition into homogeneous regions. Some experime ntal results are reported which verify the effectiveness of the proposed te chnique.