Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Master's Degree in Information and Communication Technology, Durban, University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2017. / The topic of colour image segmentation has been and still is a hot issue in areas such as computer vision and image processing because of its wide range of practical applications. The urge has led to the development of numerous colour image segmentation algorithms to extract salient objects from colour images. However, because of the diverse imaging conditions in varying application domains, accuracy and robustness of several state-of-the-art colour image segmentation algorithms still leave room for further improvement. This dissertation reports on the development of a new image segmentation algorithm based on perceptual colour difference saliency along with binary morphological operations. The algorithm consists of four essential processing stages which are colour image transformation, luminance image enhancement, salient pixel computation and image artefact filtering. The input RGB colour image is first transformed into the CIE L*a*b colour image to achieve perceptual saliency and obtain the best possible calibration of the transformation model. The luminance channel of the transformed colour image is then enhanced using an adaptive gamma correction function to alleviate the adverse effects of illumination variation, low contrast and improve the image quality significantly. The salient objects in the input colour image are then determined by calculating saliency at each pixel in order to preserve spatial information. The computed saliency map is then filtered using the morphological operations to eliminate undesired factors that are likely present in the colour image. A series of experiments was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the new perceptual colour difference saliency algorithm for colour image segmentation. This was accomplished by testing the algorithm on a large set of a hundred and ninety images acquired from four distinct publicly available benchmarks corporal. The accuracy of the developed colour image segmentation algorithm was quantified using four widely used statistical evaluation metrics in terms of precision, F-measure, error and Dice. Promising results were obtained despite the fact that the experimental images were selected from four different corporal and in varying imaging conditions. The results have indeed demonstrated that the performance of the newly developed colour image segmentation algorithm is consistent with an improved performance compared to a number of other saliency and non- saliency state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms. / M

Starting in September 1984, the Telesign project is an extensive and complex project proposed and undertaken by Dr. Nadler at Virginia Tech. The emphasis of this project is to enable the members of the deaf community to communicate visually using sign language or lip reading over the telephone network. The Image Processing Board (IPB) is the 'Brain' of the whole system. The IPB processes a given frame of an image to transmit only selected data. It uses the pseudo-laplacian operator, invented by Dr. Nadler, for edge detection. According to a recent survey of various edge detection algorithms by D. E. Pearson, [1], the pseudo-laplacian operator is the most efficient one and it produces the most natural pictures. The whole IPB hosts about one hundred LSI/VLSI chips according to the present hardware description. In the case of such a big system, hardware simulation becomes mandatory in order to ensure reliability of the design and to anticipate any kind of logic or timing errors in the design. This thesis describes the modifications to the original design to make it reconfigurable with proper initialization and the Hardware Simulation of the IPB, using General Simulation Program (GSP), including some comments on the simulators available at Virginia Tech and in particular a critique of the simulator used here. Many improvements to the simulator are suggested. Precautions to be taken while preparing the lay-out and wiring of the IPB, suggestions to simplify the design at some points at the cost of a few more chips, and lastly the instructions to run the models to get the required results, are outlined in this thesis. / Master of Science