Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 648320, 7 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/648320
Research Article

A Rate-Distortion-Based Merging Algorithm for Compressed Image Segmentation

Ying-Shen Juang,1 Hsi-Chin Hsin,2 Tze-Yun Sung,3 Yaw-Shih Shieh,3 and Carlo Cattani4

1Department of Business Administration, Chung Hua University, Hsinchu City 30012, Taiwan
2Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National United University, Miaoli 36003, Taiwan
3Department of Electronics Engineering, Chung Hua University, Hsinchu City 30012, Taiwan
4Department of Mathematics, University of Salerno, Via Ponte Don Melillo, 84084 Fisciano, Italy

Received 6 August 2012; Accepted 5 September 2012

Academic Editor: Sheng-yong Chen

Copyright © 2012 Ying-Shen Juang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Original images are often compressed for the communication applications. In order to avoid the burden of decompressing computations, it is thus desirable to segment images in the compressed domain directly. This paper presents a simple rate-distortion-based scheme to segment images in the JPEG2000 domain. It is based on a binary arithmetic code table used in the JPEG2000 standard, which is available at both encoder and decoder; thus, there is no need to transmit the segmentation result. Experimental results on the Berkeley image database show that the proposed algorithm is preferable in terms of the running time and the quantitative measures: probabilistic Rand index (PRI) and boundary displacement error (BDE).