Image segmentation of Prunus mume flower under natural background.

An algorithm TC (Texture Color) for automatically segmenting the Prunus mume flower image under natural background was proposed according to the appearance characteristics of P. mume flower. In the algorithm, two features, fractal texture and color were used to segment the interferents in the background. Firstly, the double blanket method was used to compute the local fractal dimension(LFD). Most interferents can be removed using otsu algorithm to segment the LFD image. Then the image was segmented using the relevant information of hue accumulative histogram and saturation histogram. To further improve the segmentation effects, some other operations were used in segmentation process, such as morphological operations, denoising and filling processing technology. The segmentation experiments and evaluation were made on a database of 180 P. mume images belonging to 9 different types (20 images for each type). The experimental results showed that the average probability of error can be controlled within 3% with our TC algorithm, which was better than the 2RGB model method. In addition, compared with the GrabCut algorithm, this method has higher performance and need less artificial interaction. So TC algorithm is effective in segmenting the P. mume image under natural background.