A study on the color image segmentation using the fuzzy Clustering

퍼지 클러스터링을 이용한 칼라 영상 분할

Image segmentation is the critical first step in image information extraction for computer vision systems. Clustering methods have been used extensively in color image segmentation. Most analytic fuzzy clustering approaches are divided from the fuzzy c-means(FCM) algorithm. The FCM algorithm uses fie probabilistic constraint that the memberships of a data point across classes sum to 1. However, the memberships resulting from the FCM do not always correspond to the intuitive concept of degree of belonging or compatibility. Moreover, the FCM algorithm has considerable trouble under noisy environments in the feature space. Recently, a possibilistic approach to clustering(PCM) for solving above problems was proposed. In this paper, we used the PCM for color image segmentation. This approach differs from existing fuzzy clustering methods for color image segmentation in that the resulting partition of the data can be interpreted as a possibilistic partition. So, the problems in the FCM can be solved by the PCM. But, the clustering results by the PCM are not smoothly bounded, and they often have holes. The region growing was used as a postprocessing after smoothing the noise points in the pixel seeds. In our experiments, we illustrate that the PCM us reasonable than the FCM in noisy environments.