We designed a boundary extraction system that combines several types of low-level image information into a generic notion of segmentation scale.
Our system constructs a hierarchical representation of the image boundaries called Ultrametric Contour Map (UCM).
Thresholding an UCM at level k provides by definition a set of closed curves, the boundaries of the segmentation at scale k.
The system parameters were optimized with respect to ground-truth data, in order to make the UCM and the segmentation scale completely automatic.
