How to apply watershed to segment images using matlab?
Recall that the Watershed transform treats its input as a topographic map, and simulates flooding that topography with water. The "catchment basins" or "Watershed regions" are then the parts of the map which "hold water" without spilling into other regions.

The gradient magnitude is a poor segmentation function as-is; the noise and open contours lead to an extreme oversegmentation of the image. We can try a series of morphological operations with the intent of creating approximate foreground and background markers, and use these to remove the spurious parts of the gradient.

%# Normalize.
g = gradmag - min(gradmag(:));
g = g / max(g(:));

th = graythresh(g); %# Otsu's method.
a = imhmax(g,th/2); %# Conservatively remove local maxima.
th = graythresh(a);
b = a &gt; th/4; %# Conservative global threshold.
c = imclose(b,ones(6)); %# Try to close contours.
d = imfill(c,'holes'); %# Not a bad segmentation by itself.
%# Use the rough segmentation to define markers.
g2 = imimposemin(g, ~ imdilate( bwperim(a), ones(3) );
L = watershed(g2);


This works OK. You get both groups of people and their shadows as regions, with a little bit of noise.

Can you elaborate on your goals? That is, will you be segmenting many different images or just images highly similar to this example? Do you need to ignore the shadows and separate the two overlapping people?

I will try to update the answer if you respond to these questions.

Segmentation Overlay

You asked how to overlay a segmentation. One way is to use the watershed lines to specify pixels in the original and set them to a bright color.

boundaries = L == 0;
I(boundaries) = 255;