<title>Perceptually clustering color for image segmentation</title>

Abstract

Color image segmentation is very important to machine vision, image understanding, and content-based image retrieval, etc, but there are few automatic and effective algorithms that can work fast and well on natural scene image. In this paper, we propose a new automatic color image segmentation algorithm using perceptually color clustering in Munsell(HVC) color space. Above all, we introduce the conversion formulae from (R, G, B) to (H, V, C) and the NBS color distance. Based on this, first, colors in the image are quantized to 256 colors or fewer without significantly degrading the color quality; then clustering the similar colors based on NBS color distance, finally, according to some rule, merging small color regions to its neighbor region.