Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER)

Table of Contents

• Getting started with the MSER detector

Author

Andrea Vedaldi

mser.h implements the Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) local feature detector of [19] . This detector extracts as features the connected components of the level sets of the input intensity image. Among all such regions, the ones that are locally maximally stable are selected. MSERs are affine co-variant, as well as largely co-variant to generic diffeomorphic transformations.

See Getting started with the MSER detector for an introduction on how to use the detector from the C API. For further details refer to:

• MSER fundamentals - MSER definition and parameters.

Getting started with the MSER detector

Running the MSER filter usually involves the following steps:

• Initialize the MSER filter by vl_mser_new(). The filter can be reused for images of the same size.
• Compute the MSERs by vl_mser_process().
• Optionally fit ellipsoids to the MSERs by vl_mser_ell_fit().
• Retrieve the results by vl_mser_get_regions() (and optionally vl_mser_get_ell()).
• Optionally retrieve filter statistics by vl_mser_get_stats().
• Delete the MSER filter by vl_mser_delete().