A region entropy based objective evaluation method for image segmentation

Many image segmentation methods have been proposed over the last few decades. However, the results of segmentation are usually evaluated only visually, qualitatively, or indirectly by the effectiveness of the segmentation on the subsequent processing steps. Such methods are either subjective or tied to particular applications. A few quantitative evaluation methods have been proposed, but these early methods have been based entirely on empirical analysis and have no theoretical grounding. In this paper, we put forward the concept of segmentation entropy, based on which a novel objective segmentation evaluation method is proposed. This method uses region entropy as the basis for measuring the uniformity of pixel characteristics within segmented regions and segmented entropy as a whole measure to provide a relative qualitative score that can be used to compare both various parameterizations of one particular segmentation method as well as fundamentally different segmentation techniques.