A METHOD FOR SEGMENTING FOOD COLOUR IMAGES

In this note, a method for segmenting foods from their backgrounds in colour images is presented. The proposed method has three steps: i) determination of the optimal decision plane for the segmentation of an image; ii) coarse segmentation of the image; iii) morphological operations in order to correct possible errors in the segmented image. The method was implemented in MATLAB and tested on 40 colour images of foodstuff with very different morphological and chromatic characteristics, including meat, baked products, fruit and tubers. The experimental results are presented and the performance of method in the segmentation process is assessed. The method has shown to be both effective and efficient also for colour images with high spatial resolution.