This paper presents a method for recovering and identifying image regions from an initial oversegmentation using qualitative knowledge of its content. Compared to recent works favoring spatial information and quantitative techniques, our approach focuses on simple a priori qualitative inclusion and photometric relationships such as "region A is included in region B", "the intensity of region A is lower than the one of region B" or "regions A and B depict similar intensities" (photometric uncertainty). The proposed method is based on a two steps' inexact graph matching approach. The first step searches for the best subgraph isomorphism candidate between expected regions and a subset of regions resulting from the initial oversegmentation. Then, remaining segmented regions are progressively merged with appropriate already matched regions, while preserving the coherence with a priori declared relationships. Strengths and weaknesses of the method are studied on various images (grayscale and color), with various intial oversegmentation algorithms (k-means, meanshift, quickshift). Results show the potential of the method to recover, in a reasonable runtime, expected regions, a priori described in a qualitative manner. For further evaluation and comparison purposes, a Python opensource package implementing the method is provided, together with the specifically built experimental database.

International audience