  We transpose an optimal control technique to the image segmentation problem.
The idea is to consider image segmentation as a parameter estimation problem.
The parameter to estimate is the color of the pixels of the image. We use the
adaptive parameterization technique which builds iteratively an optimal
representation of the parameter into uniform regions that form a partition of
the domain, hence corresponding to a segmentation of the image. We minimize an
error function during the iterations, and the partition of the image into
regions is optimally driven by the gradient of this error. The resulting
segmentation algorithm inherits desirable properties from its optimal control
origin: soundness, robustness, and flexibility.
