Analysis of fuzzy clustering and a generic fuzzy rule-based image segmentation technique

Many fuzzy clustering based techniques when applied to image segmentation do not incorporate spatial relationships of the pixels, while fuzzy rule-based image segmentation techniques are generally application dependent. Also for most of these techniques, the structure of the membership functions is predefined and parameters have to either automatically or manually derived. This paper addresses some of these issues by introducing a new generic fuzzy rule based image segmentation (GFRIS) technique, which is both application independent and can incorporate the spatial relationships of the pixels as well. A qualitative comparison is presented between the segmentation results obtained using this method and the popular fuzzy c-means (FCM) and possibilistic c-means (PCM) algorithms using an empirical discrepancy method. The results demonstrate this approach exhibits significant improvements over these popular fuzzy clustering algorithms for a wide range of differing image types

A generic fuzzy rule based technique for image segmentation

Many fuzzy clustering based techniques do not incorporate the spatial relationships of the pixels, while all fuzzy rule based image segmentation techniques tend to be very much application dependent. In most techniques, the structure of the membership functions are predefined and their parameters are either automatically or manually determined. This paper addresses the aforementioned problems by introducing a general fuzzy rule based image segmentation technique, which is application independent and can also incorporate the spatial relationships of the pixels. It also proposes the automatic defining of the structure of the membership functions. A qualitative comparison is made between the segmentation results using this method and the popular fuzzy c-means (FCM) applied to two types of images: light intensity (LI) and an X-ray of the human vocal tract. The results clearly show that this method exhibits significant improvements over FCM for both types of image

Extended fuzzy rules for image segmentation

The generic fuzzy rule-based image segmentation (GFRIS) technique does not produce good results for non-homogeneous regions that possess abrupt changes in pixel intensity, because it fails to consider two important properties of perceptual grouping, namely surroundedness and connectedness. A new technique called extended fuzzy rules for image segmentation (EFRIS) is proposed, which includes a second rule to that defined already in GFRIS, that incorporates both the surroundedness and connectedness properties of a region's pixels. This additional rule is based on a split-and-merge algorithm and refines the output from the GFRIS technique. Two different classes of image, namely light intensity and medical X-rays are empirically used to assess the performance of the new technique. Quantitative evaluation of the performance of EFRIS is discussed and contrasted with GFRIS using one of the standard segmentation evaluation methods. Overall, EFRIS exhibits significantly improved results compared with the GFRIS approac

Fuzzy image segmentation of generic shaped clusters

The segmentation performance of any clustering algorithm is very sensitive to the features in an image, which ultimately restricts their generalisation capability. This limitation was the primary motivation in our investigation into using shape information to improve the generality of these algorithms. Fuzzy shape-based clustering techniques already consider ring and elliptical profiles in segmentation, though most real objects are neither ring nor elliptically shaped. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a new shape-based algorithm called fuzzy image segmentation of generic shaped clusters (FISG) that incorporates generic shape information into the framework of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses confirm the superiority of FISG compared to other shape-based fuzzy clustering methods including, Gustafson-Kessel algorithm, ring-shaped, circular shell, c-ellipsoidal shells and elliptic ring-shaped clusters. The new algorithm has also been shown to be application independent so it can be applied in areas such as video object plane segmentation in MPEG-4 based coding

Self-Configuring and Evolving Fuzzy Image Thresholding

Every segmentation algorithm has parameters that need to be adjusted in order to achieve good results. Evolving fuzzy systems for adjustment of segmentation parameters have been proposed recently (Evolving fuzzy image segmentation -- EFIS [1]. However, similar to any other algorithm, EFIS too suffers from a few limitations when used in practice. As a major drawback, EFIS depends on detection of the object of interest for feature calculation, a task that is highly application-dependent. In this paper, a new version of EFIS is proposed to overcome these limitations. The new EFIS, called self-configuring EFIS (SC-EFIS), uses available training data to auto-configure the parameters that are fixed in EFIS. As well, the proposed SC-EFIS relies on a feature selection process that does not require the detection of a region of interest (ROI).Comment: To appear in proceedings of The 14th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (IEEE ICMLA 2015), Miami, Florida, USA, 201

Fuzzy image segmentation using location and intensity information

The segmentation results of any clustering algorithm are very sensitive to the features used in the similarity measure and the object types, which reduce the generalization capability of the algorithm. The previously developed algorithm called image segmentation using fuzzy clustering incorporating spatial information (FCSI) merged the independently segmented results generated by fuzzy clustering-based on pixel intensity and pixel location. The main disadvantages of this algorithm are that a perceptually selected threshold does not consider any semantic information and also produces unpredictable segmentation results for objects (regions) covering the entire image. This paper directly addresses these issues by introducing a new algorithm called fuzzy image segmentation using location and intensity (FSLI) by modifying the original FCSI algorithm. It considers the topological feature namely, connectivity and the similarity based on pixel intensity and surface variation. Qualitative and quantitative results confirm the considerable improvements achieved using the FSLI algorithm compared with FCSI and the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm for all three alternatives, namely clustering using only pixel intensity, pixel location and a combination of the two, for a range of sample of images