Region-based segmentation of 2D and 3D images with tissue-like P systems

Membrane Computing is a biologically inspired computational model. Its devices are called P systems and they perform computations by applying a finite set of rules in a synchronous, maximally parallel way. In this paper, we develop a variant of P-system, called tissue-like P system in order to design in this computational setting, a region-based segmentation algorithm of 2D pixel-based and 3D voxel-based digital images. Concretely, we use 4-adjacency neighborhood relation between pixels in 20 and 6-adjacency neighborhood relation between voxel in 3D for segmenting digital images in a constant number of steps. Finally, specific software is used to check the validity of these systems with some simple examples. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.