3D Image Segmentation Using the Bounded Irregular Pyramid

This paper presents a novel pyramid approach for fast segmentationof 3D images. A pyramid is a hierarchy of successively reducedgraphs whose efficiency is strongly influenced by the data structure thatcodes the information within the pyramid and the decimation processused to build a graph from the graph below. Depending on these twofeatures, pyramids have been classified as regular and irregular ones.The proposed approach extends the idea of the Bounded Irregular Pyramid(BIP) [5] to 3D images. Thus, the 3D-BIP is a mixture of both typesof pyramids whose goal is to combine their advantages: the low computationalcost of regular pyramids with the consistent and useful resultsprovided by the irregular ones. Specifically, its data structure combines aregular decimation process with an union-find strategy to build the successive3D levels of the structure. Experimental results show that thisapproach is able to provide a low-level segmentation of 3D images at alow computational cost.1