• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.73-82
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• 2005

This paper proposes a multi-level thresholding method using weighted FCM(Fuzzy C-Means) algorithm in color image. FCM algerian determines a more optimal thresholding value than the existing methods and can extend to multi-level thresholding. But FCM algerian is sensitive to noise because it doesn't include spatial information. To solve the problem, we can remove noise by applying a weight based on entropy that is obtained from neighboring pixels to FCM algerian. And we determine the optimal cluster number by using within-class distance in code image based on the clustered pixels of each color component. In the experiments, we show that the proposed method is more tolerant to noise and is more superior than the existing methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.20-27
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• 2006

Multi-level thresholding is a method that is widely used in image segmentation. However most of the existing methods are not suited to be directly used in applicable fields and moreover expanded until a step of image segmentation. This paper proposes region-based multi-level thresholding as an image segmentation method. At first we classify pixels of each color channel to two clusters by using EWFCM(Entropy-based Weighted Fuzzy C-Means) algorithm that is an improved FCM algorithm with spatial information between pixels. To obtain better segmentation results, a reduction of clusters is then performed by a region-based reclassification step based on a similarity between regions existing in a cluster and the other clusters. The clusters are created using the classification information of pixels according to color channel. We finally perform a region merging by Bayesian algorithm based on Kullback-Leibler distance between a region and the neighboring regions as a post-processing method as many regions still exist in image. Experiments show that region-based multi-level thresholding is superior to cluster-, pixel-based multi-level thresholding, and the existing mettled. And much better segmentation results are obtained by the post-processing method.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.16-25
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• 2020

Vegetation segmentation in a field color image is a process of distinguishing vegetation objects of interests like crops and weeds from a background of soil and/or other residues. The performance of the process is crucial in automatic precision agriculture which includes weed control and crop status monitoring. To facilitate the segmentation, color indices have predominantly been used to transform the color image into its gray-scale image. A thresholding technique like the Otsu method is then applied to distinguish vegetation parts from the background. An obvious demerit of the thresholding based segmentation will be that classification of each pixel into vegetation or background is carried out solely by using the color feature of the pixel itself without taking into account color features of its neighboring pixels. This paper presents a new pixel-based segmentation method which employs a multi-layer perceptron neural network to classify the gray-scale image into vegetation and nonvegetation pixels. The input data of the neural network for each pixel are 2-dimensional gray-level values surrounding the pixel. To generate a gray-scale image from a raw RGB color image, a well-known color index called Excess Green minus Excess Red Index was used. Experimental results using 80 field images of 4 vegetation species demonstrate the superiority of the neural network to existing threshold-based segmentation methods in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and harmonic mean.