An improved watershed segmentation algorithm with thermal markers for multispectral image analysis

As part of a broader research effort in multispectral image analysis, an improved segmentation algorithm based on the classical Watershed concept was developed. A requirement for this research was to develop a segmentation algorithm that could effectively extract objects of interest in both visual and thermal image pairs. The classical Watershed algorithm can be enhanced with "markers" identifying clusters of pixels belonging to the same object or to the background. There are several ways to create the markers and the proposed Watershed with Thermal Markers allows the user to extract objects of interest from both visual and/or thermal dataset using an initial seed extracted from the thermal image.