Waterpixels.

Many approaches for image segmentation rely on a first low-level segmentation step, where an image is partitioned into homogeneous regions with enforced regularity and adherence to object boundaries. Methods to generate these superpixels have gained substantial interest in the last few years, but only a few have made it into applications in practice, in particular because the requirements on the processing time are essential but are not met by most of them. Here, we propose waterpixels as a general strategy for generating superpixels which relies on the marker controlled watershed transformation.