A color image segmentation algorithm combined marker-based watershed and region merger was proposed in this paper to deal with over-segmentation.Firstly

it extracted minima-marker adaptively according to the information of local minima of gradient

and watershed the marked gradient image to get the pre-segmentation result.Then

it modified region distance according to real sense of region-similarity of human-vision

and defined an integration distance measurement considering color distance

color difference and edge information

which would lead the pre-segmentation regions to merge to a final segmentation result.The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can well suppress the over-segmentation and obtain a satisfactory result

which owns a lower Local Consistency Error and are more accordant to the human-vision segmentation.