A robust multi-agent Negotiation for advanced Image Segmentation: Design and Implementation

Abstract

It is generally accepted that segmentation is a critical problem that influences subsequent tasks during image processing. Often, the proposed approaches provide effectiveness for a limited type of images with a significant lack of a global solution. The difficulty of segmentation lies in the complexity of providing a global solution with acceptable accuracy within a reasonable time. To overcome this problem, some solutions combined several methods. This paper presents a method for segmenting 2D/3D images by merging regions and solving problems encountered during the process using a multi-agent system (MAS). We are using the strengths of MAS by opting for a compromise that satisfies segmentation by agents’ acts. Regions with high similarity are merged immediately, while the others with low similarity are ignored. The remaining ones, with ambiguous similarity, are solved in a coalition by negotiation. In our system, the agents make decisions according to the utility functions adopting the Pareto optimal in Game theory. Unlike hierarchical merging methods, MAS performs a hypothetical merger planning then negotiates the agreements' subsets to merge all regions at once.