Study and Development of Some Novel Image Segmentation Techniques

Some fuzzy technique based segmentation methods are studied and implemented and some fuzzy c means clustering based segmentation algorithms are developed in this thesis to suppress high and low uniform random noise. The reason for not developing fuzzy rule based segmentation method is that they are application dependent In many occasions, the images in real life are affected with noise. Fuzzy c means clustering based segmentation does not give good segmentation result under such condition. Various extension of the FCM method for segmentation are present in the literature. But most of them modify the objective function hence changing the basic FCM algorithm present in MATLAB toolboxes. Hence efforts have been made to develop FCM algorithm without modifying their objective function for better segmentation . The fuzzy technique based segmentation methods that are studied and developed are summarized here. (A) Fuzzy edge detection based segmentation: Two fuzzy edge detection methods are studied and implemented for segmentation: (i) FIS based edge detection and (ii) Fast multilevel fuzzy edge detector (FMFED). (i): The Fuzzy Inference system (FIS) based edge detector consists of some fuzzy inference rules which are defined in such a way that the FIS system output (“edges”) is high only for those pixels belonging to edges in the input image. A robustness to contrast and lightining variations were also taken into consideration while developing these rules.The output of the FIS based edge detector is then compared with the existing Sobel, LoG and Canny edge detector results. The algorithm is seen to be application dependent and time consuming. (ii) Fast Multilevel Fuzzy Edge Detector: To realise the fast and accurate detection of edges, the FMFED algorithm is proposed. It first enhances the image contrast by means of a fast multilevel fuzzy enhancement algorithm using simple transformation function based on two image thresholds. Second, the edges are extracted from the enhanced image by using a two stage edge detector operator that identifies the edge candidates based on local characteristics of the image and then determines the true edge pixels using edge detector operator based on extremum of the gradient values. Finally the segmentation of the edge image is done by morphological operator by edge linking. (B) FCM based segmentation: Two fuzzy clustering based segmentation methods are developed: (i) Modified Spatial Fuzzy c-Means (MSFCM) (ii) Neighbourhood Attraction Fuzzy c-Means (NAFCM). . (i) Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization Fuzzy c-Means (CLAHEFCM): This proposed algorithm presents a color segmentation process for low contrast images or unevenly illuminated images. The algorithm presented in this paper first enhances the contrast of the image by using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization. After the enhancement of the image this method divides the color space into a given number of clusters, the number of cluster are fixed initially. The image is converted from RGB color space to LAB color space before the clustering process. Clustering is done here by using Fuzzy c means algorithm. The image is segmented based on color of a region, that is, areas having same color are grouped together. The image segmentation is done by taking into consideration, to which cluster a given pixel belongs the most. The method has been applied on a number of color test images and it is observed to give good segmentation results (ii) Modified Spatial Fuzzy c-means (MSFCM): The proposed algorithm divides the color space into a given number of clusters, the number of cluster are fixed initially. The image is converted from RGB color space to LAB color space before the clustering process. A robust segmentation technique based on extension to the traditional fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is proposed. The spatial information of each pixel in an image has been taken into consideration to get a noise free segmentation result. The image is segmented based on color of a region, that is, areas having same color are grouped together. The image segmentation is done by taking into consideration, to which cluster a given pixel belongs the most. The method has been applied to some color test images and its performance has been compared to FCM and FCM based methods to show its superiority over them. The proposed technique is observed to be an efficient and easy method for segmentation of noisy images. (iv) Neighbourhood Attraction Fuzzy c Means Algorithm: A new algorithm based on the IFCM neighbourhood attraction is used without changing the distance function of the FCM and hence avoiding an extra neural network optimization step for the adjusting parameters of the distance function, it is called Neighborhood Atrraction FCM (NAFCM). During clustering, each pixel attempts to attract its neighbouring pixels towards its own cluster. This neighbourhood attraction depends on two factors: the pixel intensities or feature attraction, and the spatial position of the neighbours or distance attraction, which also depends on neighbourhood structure. The NAFCM algorithm is tested on a synthetic image (chapter 6, figure 6.3-6.6) and a number of skin tumor images. It is observed to produce excellent clustering result under high noise condition when compared with the other FCM based clustering methods

A Comparison of Fuzzy Clustering Algorithms Applied to Feature Extraction on Vineyard

Image segmentation is a process by which an image is partitioned into regions with similar features. Many approaches have been proposed for color image segmentation, but Fuzzy C-Means has been widely used, because it has a good performance in a large class of images. However, it is not adequate for noisy images and it also takes more time for execution as compared to other method as K-means. For this reason, several methods have been proposed to improve these weaknesses. Method like Possibilistic C-Means, Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means, Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means and Fuzzy C-Means with Gustafson-Kessel algorithm. In this paper we perform a comparison of these clustering algorithms applied to feature extraction on vineyard images. Segmented images are evaluated using several quality parameters such as the rate of correctly classied area and runtim

Color Textured Image Segmentation Using ICICM - Interval Type-2 Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Hybrid Approach

Segmentation is an essential process in image because of its wild application such as image analysis, medical image analysis, pattern reorganization, etc. Color and texture are most significant low-level features in an image. Normally, color-textured image segmentation consists of two steps: (i) extracting the feature and (ii) clustering the feature vector. This paper presents the hybrid approach for color texture segmentation using Haralick features extracted from the Integrated Color and Intensity Co-occurrence Matrix (ICICM). Then, Extended- Interval Type-2 Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster the obtained feature vectors into several classes corresponding to the different regions of the textured image. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach could obtain better cluster quality and segmentation results compared to state-of-art image segmentation algorithms

Color Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy C-Regression Model

Image segmentation is one important process in image analysis and computer vision and is a valuable tool that can be applied in fields of image processing, health care, remote sensing, and traffic image detection. Given the lack of prior knowledge of the ground truth, unsupervised learning techniques like clustering have been largely adopted. Fuzzy clustering has been widely studied and successfully applied in image segmentation. In situations such as limited spatial resolution, poor contrast, overlapping intensities, and noise and intensity inhomogeneities, fuzzy clustering can retain much more information than the hard clustering technique. Most fuzzy clustering algorithms have originated from fuzzy c-means (FCM) and have been successfully applied in image segmentation. However, the cluster prototype of the FCM method is hyperspherical or hyperellipsoidal. FCM may not provide the accurate partition in situations where data consists of arbitrary shapes. Therefore, a Fuzzy C-Regression Model (FCRM) using spatial information has been proposed whose prototype is hyperplaned and can be either linear or nonlinear allowing for better cluster partitioning. Thus, this paper implements FCRM and applies the algorithm to color segmentation using Berkeley’s segmentation database. The results show that FCRM obtains more accurate results compared to other fuzzy clustering algorithms

Fuzzy C-means Clustering and Pseudo-coloring-based Pest detection of Ripe-Fruit Health Monitoring System using 2-D Aggrotech Images

Fruits are the gift of almighty to nature. Fresh fruit promote good health and having rich source of micronutrients, vitamins and fiber value. But due to its high sugar level on ripping stage different type of pest are attracted by its smell and effects on harvesting. This paper focuses on identification of the pest on ripe fruits using Fuzzy C Means (FCM) clustering for segmentation and simultaneously highlights the segmented insects with Pseudo-coloring using Pseudo-color image processing techniques. IoT integrated Drone based images are inputted as the dataset to perform detection of pest on fruit monitoring system. Before clustering-based segmentation the images undergo preprocessing stage for tone correction and noise removal. Hybrid FCM with Pseudo-color image processing method supersedes many segmentation algorithms by performance

Color and Texture Feature Extraction Using Gabor Filter - Local Binary Patterns for Image Segmentation with Fuzzy C-Means

Image segmentation to be basic for image analysis and recognition process. Segmentation divides the image into several regions based on the unique homogeneous image pixel. Image segmentation classify homogeneous pixels basedon several features such as color, texture and others. Color contains a lot of information and human vision can see thousands of color combinations and intensity compared with grayscale or with black and white (binary). The method is easy to implement to segementation is clustering method such as the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm. Features to beextracted image is color and texture, to use the color vector L* a* b* color space and to texture using Gabor filters. However, Gabor filters have poor performance when the image is segmented many micro texture, thus affecting the accuracy of image segmentation. As support in improving the accuracy of the extracted micro texture used method of Local Binary Patterns (LBP). Experimental use of color features compared with grayscales increased 16.54% accuracy rate for texture Gabor filters and 14.57% for filter LBP. While the LBP texture features can help improve the accuracy of image segmentation, although small at 2% on a grayscales and 0.05% on the color space L* a* b*

A Novel Segmentation Approach for Brain Tumor in MRI

Brain MR image segmentation is one of the most important applications of image segmentation technique in medicine, and is an important part of clinical diagnostic tools. Segmented image can help physicians to identify tumor tissues in brain, estimate tumor size, and monitor effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments. Manual segmentation of tumor regions in MR images is not only inaccurate, but also time consuming. In a ColorMRITM fusion image of axial brain shown in Figure 1, the active tumor is pink exhibiting some heterogeneity and the adjacent white matter is edematous (pale green). Segmentation using pixel color intensities directly will group together specific areas of gadolinium uptake in the tumor as well as some non-specific uptake in the posterior orbital fat together (Figure 2). Obviously, using Figure 2 can not measure tumor region area correctly. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) is a clustering method that allows a data point to belong to more than one cluster. Each point has a degree of belonging to a cluster. However, FCM along can not correctly segment tumor tissues in brain MR images. Intensity Space Map (ISM) is a region growing segmentation algorithm for medical images. The assumption for ISM is that pixels inside the region of interest not only have similar color intensities but also connect to other pixels inside the anatomical region. For color MR images, there are multiple intensity channels, i.e. red, green and blue channels respectively. Hence, an Intensity Space Map (ISM) is proposed for each color channel in a color image. The ISM algorithm starts with a pre-selected seed point inside the region of interest. Initial values of all pixels in the ISM image are set to zero. During each iteration, the ISM values of pixels of each intensity channel which satisfy both of the following conditions are incremented by 1: Condition 1: pixel intensity difference from the seed point is within a threshold T; Condition 2: the pixel belongs to a structure which overlaps the seed point. In this work, we use the intensity space map (ISM) and fuzzy c-means algorithms to perform brain tumor segmentation in images extracted from longitudinal relaxation time T1 and transverse relaxation time T2 MR images. ISM utilizes both pixel color intensity and image topological information. It is a promising candidate as a predicate used for segmentation. Experimental results show that fuzzy c-means segmentation applied on ISM can effectively segment brain tumor regions in MR images. It provides a solid foundation for tumor volume estimation for physicians to evaluate progress of the cancer and effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments

Fuzzy C-Means Clustering with Histogram based Cluster Selection for Skin Lesion Segmentation using Non-Dermoscopic Images

Purpose – Pre-screening of skin lesion for malignancy is highly demanded as melanoma being a life-threatening skin cancer due to unpaired DNA damage. In this paper, lesion segmentation based on Fuzzy C-Means clustering using non-dermoscopic images has been proposed. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed methodology consists of automatic cluster selection for FCM using the histogram property. The system used the local maxima along with Euclidean distance to detect the binomial distribution property of the image histogram, to segment the melanoma from normal skin. As the Value channel of HSV color image provides better and distinct histogram distribution based on the entropy, it has been used for segmentation purpose. Findings – The proposed system can effectively segment the lesion region from the normal skin. The system provides a segmentation accuracy of 95.69 % and the comparative analysis has been performed with various segmentation methods. From the analysis, it has been observed that the proposed system can effectively segment the lesion region from normal skin automatically. Originality/Value – This paper suggests a new approach for skin lesion segmentation based on FCM with automatic cluster selection. Here, different color channel has also been analyzed using entropy to select the better channel for segmentation. In future, the classification of melanoma from benign naevi can be performed