H-minima transform for segmentation of structured surface

Abstract

The watershed segmentation method has been used in surface metrology to determine the feature parameter and the segment of areal surfaces. However, during segmentation, over-segmentation always happens, which may overshadow the significant features. Thus, a new method is required to reduce this over-segmentation, as well as to retain the necessary information for further improvement in the signal processing data. Hence, this paper proposed a new method to overcome over-segmentation for segmentation of structured surface. Over-segmentation happens when the surface area is over-segmented into a large number of insignificant, tiny, and shallow hills and dales features rather than a few significant dales/hills features. H-minima transform was proposed to overcome this issue. From the results, the data pertaining to simulated and measured surface topographies, as well as height threshold value of H-minima transform had depended on the irregularities of the surface to obtain the required features. As a result, it had been concluded that H-minima transform is possible to reduce over-segmentation.