Robust Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Algorithm Based on Normal Shrink and Membership Filtering for Image Segmentation

The robustness and effectiveness of image segmentation using the FCM algorithm can be improved by incorporating local spatial information into the FCM method, which is particularly noise-tolerant. However the introduction of local spatial information gives more computational complexity. Hence to overcome this problem an improved FCM clustering method is proposed which is based on a normal shrink algorithm with membership filtering. The Proposed method gives a faster and more robust result in comparison to FCM. Firstly, a normal shrink denoising algorithm is introduced to preserve the image details and noise immunity. Secondly, membership filtering is introduced, which depends only on the local spatial neighboring properties of the matrix called the membership partition matrix. The Proposed method is faster and simpler as it does not calculate the distance between pixels and cluster centers and between local spatial neighboring. Also, it is very efficient for noise immunity

Pomegranate MR image analysis using fuzzy clustering algorithms

In this paper, the process of the pomegranate magnetic resonance (MR) images was studied.  Its internal structure is composed of tissue and seeds, which indicate the dependency between the maturity and internal quality.  The latter properties are important in pomegranate’s sorting and cannot be measured manually.  In this paper, an automatic algorithm was proposed to segment the internal structure of pomegranates.  Since the intensities of the calyx and stem of the pomegranate MR image are closely related to that of the soft tissue, their corresponding pixels are therefore labeled in the same class of the internal soft tissues.  In order to solve this problem, the exact shape of the pomegranate is first extracted from the background of the image using active contour models (ACMs).  Then, the stem and calyx are removed using morphological filters.  We have also proposed an improved version of the fuzzy c-means algorithm (FCM), the spatial FCM (SFCM), for segmentation of MR images of pomegranate.  SFCM is realized by incorporating the spatial neighborhood information into the standard FCM and modifying the membership weighting of each cluster.  SFCM employs spatial information of adjacent pixels leading to an improvement of the results.  It thus outperforms other techniques like FCM, even in the presence of Gaussian, salt and pepper, and speckle noises. Keywords: MRI, pomegranate, image segmentation, spatial fuzzy c-means, morphological filter&nbsp

Residual-Sparse Fuzzy CC-Means Clustering Incorporating Morphological Reconstruction and Wavelet frames

Instead of directly utilizing an observed image including some outliers, noise or intensity inhomogeneity, the use of its ideal value (e.g. noise-free image) has a favorable impact on clustering. Hence, the accurate estimation of the residual (e.g. unknown noise) between the observed image and its ideal value is an important task. To do so, we propose an $\ell_0$ regularization-based Fuzzy $C$-Means (FCM) algorithm incorporating a morphological reconstruction operation and a tight wavelet frame transform. To achieve a sound trade-off between detail preservation and noise suppression, morphological reconstruction is used to filter an observed image. By combining the observed and filtered images, a weighted sum image is generated. Since a tight wavelet frame system has sparse representations of an image, it is employed to decompose the weighted sum image, thus forming its corresponding feature set. Taking it as data for clustering, we present an improved FCM algorithm by imposing an $\ell_0$ regularization term on the residual between the feature set and its ideal value, which implies that the favorable estimation of the residual is obtained and the ideal value participates in clustering. Spatial information is also introduced into clustering since it is naturally encountered in image segmentation. Furthermore, it makes the estimation of the residual more reliable. To further enhance the segmentation effects of the improved FCM algorithm, we also employ the morphological reconstruction to smoothen the labels generated by clustering. Finally, based on the prototypes and smoothed labels, the segmented image is reconstructed by using a tight wavelet frame reconstruction operation. Experimental results reported for synthetic, medical, and color images show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient, and outperforms other algorithms.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figur

Fuzzy Image Segmentation using Suppressed Fuzzy C-Means Clustering

Clustering algorithms are highly dependent on the features used and the type of the objects in a particular image. By considering object similar surface variations (SSV) as well as the arbitrariness of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm for pixellocation, a fuzzy image segmentation considering object surface similarity (FSOS) algorithm was developed, but it was unable to segment objects having SSV satisfactorily. To improve the effectiveness of FSOS in segmenting objects with SSV, thispaper introduces a new fuzzy image segmentation using suppressed fuzzy c-means clustering (FSSC) algorithm, which directly considers object SSV and incorporates the use of suppressed-FCM (SFCM) using pixel location. The algorithmalso perceptually selects the threshold within the range of human visual perception. Both qualitative and quantitative resultsconfirm the improved segmentation performance of FSSC compared with other algorithms including FSOS, FCM,possibilistic c-means (PCM) and SFCM for many different images

DroTrack: High-speed Drone-based Object Tracking Under Uncertainty

We present DroTrack, a high-speed visual single-object tracking framework for drone-captured video sequences. Most of the existing object tracking methods are designed to tackle well-known challenges, such as occlusion and cluttered backgrounds. The complex motion of drones, i.e., multiple degrees of freedom in three-dimensional space, causes high uncertainty. The uncertainty problem leads to inaccurate location predictions and fuzziness in scale estimations. DroTrack solves such issues by discovering the dependency between object representation and motion geometry. We implement an effective object segmentation based on Fuzzy C Means (FCM). We incorporate the spatial information into the membership function to cluster the most discriminative segments. We then enhance the object segmentation by using a pre-trained Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model. DroTrack also leverages the geometrical angular motion to estimate a reliable object scale. We discuss the experimental results and performance evaluation using two datasets of 51,462 drone-captured frames. The combination of the FCM segmentation and the angular scaling increased DroTrack precision by up to $9\%$ and decreased the centre location error by $162$ pixels on average. DroTrack outperforms all the high-speed trackers and achieves comparable results in comparison to deep learning trackers. DroTrack offers high frame rates up to 1000 frame per second (fps) with the best location precision, more than a set of state-of-the-art real-time trackers.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, FUZZ-IEEE 202

Development of Texture Weighted Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm for 3D Brain MRI Segmentation

The segmentation of human brain Magnetic Resonance Image is an essential component in the computer-aided medical image processing research. Brain is one of the fields that are attracted to Magnetic Resonance Image segmentation because of its importance to human. Many algorithms have been developed over decades for brain Magnetic Resonance Image segmentation for diagnosing diseases, such as tumors, Alzheimer, and Schizophrenia. Fuzzy C-Means algorithm is one of the practical algorithms for brain Magnetic Resonance Image segmentation. However, Intensity Non- Uniformity problem in brain Magnetic Resonance Image is still challenging to existing Fuzzy C-Means algorithm. In this paper, we propose the Texture weighted Fuzzy C-Means algorithm performed with Local Binary Patterns on Three Orthogonal Planes. By incorporating texture constraints, Texture weighted Fuzzy C-Means could take into account more global image information. The proposed algorithm is divided into following stages: Volume of Interest is extracted by 3D skull stripping in the pre-processing stage. The initial Fuzzy C-Means clustering and Local Binary Patterns on Three Orthogonal Planes feature extraction are performed to extract and classify each cluster’s features. At the last stage, Fuzzy C-Means with texture constraints refines the result of initial Fuzzy C-Means. The proposed algorithm has been implemented to evaluate the performance of segmentation result with Dice’s coefficient and Tanimoto coefficient compared with the ground truth. The results show that the proposed algorithm has the better segmentation accuracy than existing Fuzzy C-Means models for brain Magnetic Resonance Image

A Modified Brain MR Image Segmentation and Bias Field Estimation Model Based on Local and Global Information

Because of the poor radio frequency coil uniformity and gradient-driven eddy currents, there is much noise and intensity inhomogeneity (bias) in brain magnetic resonance (MR) image, and it severely affects the segmentation accuracy. Better segmentation results are difficult to achieve by traditional methods; therefore, in this paper, a modified brain MR image segmentation and bias field estimation model based on local and global information is proposed. We first construct local constraints including image neighborhood information in Gaussian kernel mapping space, and then the complete regularization is established by introducing nonlocal spatial information of MR image. The weighting between local and global information is automatically adjusted according to image local information. At the same time, bias field information is coupled with the model, and it makes the model reduce noise interference but also can effectively estimate the bias field information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has strong robustness to noise and bias field is well corrected