A general technique for the recovery of signi cant image features is presented. The technique is based on the mean shift algorithm, a simple nonparametric pro- cedure for estimating density gradients. Drawbacks of the current methods (including robust clustering) are avoided. Feature space of any nature can be processed, and as an example, color image segmentation is dis- cussed. The segmentation is completely autonomous, only its class is chosen by the user. Thus, the same program can produce a high quality edge image, or pro- vide, by extracting all the signi cant colors, a prepro- cessor for content-based query systems. A 512 512 color image is analyzed in less than 10 seconds on a standard workstation. Gray level images are handled as color images having only the lightness coordinate
