New approach of entropy estimation for robust image segmentation

Abstract

In this work we introduce a new approach for robust image segmentation. The idea is to combine two strategies within a Bayesian framework. The first one is to use a Márkov Random Field (MRF), which allows to introduce prior information with the purpose of preserve the edges in the image. The second strategy comes from the fact that the probability density function (pdf) of the likelihood function is non Gaussian or unknown, so it should be approximated by an estimated version, and for this, it is used the classical non-parametric or kernel density estimation. This two strategies together lead us to the definition of a new maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator based on the minimization of the entropy of the estimated pdf of the likelihood function and the MRF at the same time, named MAP entropy estimator (MAPEE). Some experiments were made for different kind of images degraded with impulsive noise and the segmentation results are very satisfactory and promising.