Structured grids for label propagation on a finite number of layers

Abstract

An image represented by multiple nodes can be processed by determining whether labels can be propagated to a node from another node of the image. Conceptually, an image can be presented as a 'structured grid' of multiple nodes (e.g., a structured grid of pixels of an image). In a 'structured grid,' two or more nodes of the same level (e.g., nodes in the same gray level) can determine in parallel whether to propagate a label from one or more of its neighboring nodes that are labeled and propagate one or more labels accordingly. An image can be processed by iteratively repeating this process for nodes of successive levels. It will be appreciated that the disclosed techniques allow parallelism without requiring partitioning of an image or having to merge partitioned images. The disclosed techniques are especially suited for watershed algorithms.