The main key point of preferential image segmentation is to segment object of user interest based on intensities, boundaries and texture and ignoring the remaining portions. It utilizes a tree of shapes to represent the image content. This representation provides a hierarchical tree for the objects contained in the level sets of the image. The hierarchical structure is utilized to select the candidate objects from the image. The J-segmentation (J-SEG) provides a way to construct a tree of shapes. The boundaries of the selected objects are then compared with those of objects selected from prior images.