TY - CHAP A1 - Metzler, Volker H. A1 - Vandenhouten, Ralf A1 - Krone, Jörg A1 - Grebe, Reinhard T1 - Unsupervised image segementation by stochastic reconstruction T2 - Proceedings of SPIE N2 - To segment complex and versatile image data from different modalities it is almost impossible to achieve satisfying results without the consideration of contextual information. In this approach, image segmentation is regarded as a high- dimensional optimization task, that can be solved by stochastical methods like evolutionary algorithms (EA). Initially, the iterative algorithm is provided with a set of good-quality sample segmentations. An efficient EA-based learning strategy generates a segmentation for a given target image from the provided samples. This two-level process consists of a global image-based optimization whose convergence is enhanced by locally operating pixel-based Boltzmann processes which restrict the search space to reasonable subsets. The stochastic reconstruction extracts the relevant information from the samples in order to adapt it onto the current segmentation problem, which results in a consistent labeling for the target image. The algorithm works unsupervised, because the range of possible labels and their contextual interpretation is provided implicitly by the sample segmentations. To prove the usefulness of the method experimental results based on both, reproducible phantom images and physiological NMR scans are presented. Moreover, an analysis of the basic segmentation and convergence properties is provided. Y1 - 1998 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:526-opus4-9329 SN - 1996-756X VL - 3338 ER -