Fast colour image segmentation using a pre-clustered chromaticity-plane

Abstract

We present an efficient method for segmenting colour-images, which may be utilised in several robotic vision tasks. It categorises pixels according to their perceptual colour by exploiting the chromaticity contained in the signal of a standard colour camera as an index into a pre-clustered chromaticity plane. A technique called perceptual colour grouping is introduced to prevent oversegmentation. Experimental data demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach; computation time is reduced by a factor of 8...30 over previously known methods.