Abstract: Growth conditions and degree of maturity are two important factors affecting the quality of tea, while accurate segmentation of tea images is the precondition to analyze and identify the tea leaves. In this paper, an improved method based on the color and regional growth of tea is introduced to conduct the image segmentation of tender tea shoots. Firstly, the RGB color images are converted into HSI space, and then H and S parameters are selected for the initial selection of tea seed. Secondly, the regional growth based on color similarity and regional adjacency are conducted on the seed region, and then the color and edge distance is used to carry out regional growing and mergence. The image segmentation of tender tea shoots acquired from the different perspectives are conduced and compared, and the results indicate that this algorithm performs well in separating tender shoots from leaves and maintaining the outline of tender shoots.

Key words: tea image, tea burgeon segmentation, seed region, region growing, color space