Image Segmentation through Clustering Based on Natural Computing Techniques

Clustering-based segmentation algorithm is one of the common methods in image segmentation. However, how to avoid the influence of the initialization and the singular value is a problem we have to face. For overcoming this problem, we proposed a new image segmentation technology which is based on the AIC criterion and not affected by the singular values. The simulation results show that the method has good performance on stability and accuracy. Image segmentation is the key step in image analysis of computer vision and image processing field. It has been widely applied in various areas such as in the process of automating production, sensing images and biomedical images. The main goal of image segmentation is to simplify an image into segments that have a strong correlation with objects in the real world. The existing segmentation algorithm can be generally divided into three classes: edge detection, region- based segmentation and data clustering. Edge detection method relies on the edges of the object with background and the other objects. For the images with noise, it is difficult to separate the boundary and the target background (1). Region- based segmentation method segments an image into several meaningful sub-domains that are non-overlapping and same- nature. But it may lead to the over-segmentation, and has to combine with other methods to use (2). Data clustering method is based on the whole image and considers the distance between each data. Advantages of data clustering method are low complexity and easy to implement. Disadvantages are sensitive to the noise and selection of the initial centroids (3). Data clustering is one of the common techniques in image segmentation. Its purpose is to cluster pixels into several parts (regions) according to the feature of image. Based on the properties of clustering algorithm, researchers have proposed various image segmentation algorithm, such as based on hierarchical clustering, based on K-means clustering, based on fuzzy clustering, based on mean shift, and so on (3-5). Clustering analysis is an unsupervised process of partitioning a data set into subsets of similar data objects. The elementary principle is as far as possible to increase the difference between categories and reduce the difference within the category. In the process of image segmentation based on data clustering, thus the objective is that the similar pixels are divided into the same regions and the non-similar pixels are divided into different regions. However, Two difficulties we must face are that how to determine the cluster centers and avoid influence of noise. In this paper, a new image segmentation algorithm is proposed based on the AIC criterion. The new segmentation technology can achieve an ideal performance and not affected by the initialization of centroids and the singular values. The simulation results verify the efficiency of proposed algorithm.

A novel neural network-based technique for segmentation of single-channel magnetic resonance images is presented. The segmentation of single-channel magnetic resonance images is a daunting task due to the relatively little information available at each pixel site. The proposed algorithm is based on unsupervised clustering by means of a Kohonen Self-Organizing Map: unsupervised segmentation algorithms are highly desirable in order to eliminate intra- and interobserver variability. Particular attention has been devoted to the choice of suitable features, in order to ensure an accurate and reliable segmentation: in particular, a feature set extracted from the neighborhood of each pixel has been evaluated. The proposed technique has been tested on simulated magnetic resonance images to assess its stability against the presence of noise and intensity inhomogeneities. Moreover, it has been tested on real magnetic resonance images of both volunteers and brain tumor patients. The preliminary results presented make the proposed technique a promising alternative for the segmentation of single-channel magnetic resonance images and encourage further investigation.

Summary. Pattern recognition has as its objective to classify objects into different categories and classes. It is a fundamental component of artificial intelligence and computer vision. This chapter investigates the application of an efficient optimization method, known as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), to the field of pattern recognition and image processing. First a clustering method that is based on PSO is discussed. The application of the proposed clustering algorithm to the problem of unsupervised classification and segmentation of images is investigated. Then PSObased approaches that tackle the color image quantization and spectral unmixing problems are discussed.

information from the original image as compared with crisp or hard segmentation methods. In practice, noisy images (even high noise images) are very co mmon. It's very essential and critical to deal with such images to process real-image segmentation and pattern recognition. In this paper, differences of credibilistic clustering algorithm (CCA) and fuzzy c-means algorithm (FCM) in dealing with noisy images are studied and the research shows that in most cases, CCA performs better than FCM in high noise image segmentation. Based on that, a new kind of fuzzy clustering methods is presented. It combines spatial credibilistic clustering algorithm (SCCA) with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and takes full advantages of them. The advantages that come from CCA in noise image segmentation also help in SCCA, and the imposition of spatial information enlarges the advantage. The addition of PSO helps to improve global search performance; thereby the novel methods overcome the drawback of single clustering methods - local optimal solutions. Computational experiments show that the proposed methods give the best segmentation results when compared with FCM, CCA, spatial fuzzy c-means algorithm (SFCM), SCCA and the PSO incorporated versions of FCM, CCA, and SFCM.

Image segmentation (IS) is a procedure by which provided picture can be subdivided into many segments and to observe every segment included in the image. The desired result could be searched by observing them and that information we get is helpful for high standard machine vision software. The difficulties of IS has large problems for computer vision. Many procedures which came under IS are Edge based IS (EBIS), Region based IS (RBIS), Threshold based IS (TBIS). The result of observing image which is relying upon the reliability of IS, but exact division of a picture is most difficult issue. The technique we are using in this article is thresholding based segmentation (TBS). The studied article of IS by reader is beneficial for analyzing the suitable IS techniques and also for improvement of efficiency, performance and major goal, that helps in building latest algorithms.

We propose a novel approach to investigate and implement unsupervised image content understanding and segmentation of color industrial images like medical imaging, forensic imaging, security and surveillance imaging, biotechnical imaging, biometrics, mineral and mining imaging, material science imaging, and many more. In this particular work, our focus will be on medical images only. The aim is to develop a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system based on a newly developed Multidimensional Spatially Variant Finite Mixture Model (MSVFMM) using Markov Random Fields (MRF) Model. Unsupervised means automatic discovery of classes or clusters in images rather than generating the class or cluster descriptions from training image sets. The aim of this work is to produce precise segmentation of color medical images on the basis of subtle color and texture variation. Finer segmentation of images has tremendous potential in medical imaging where subtle information related to color and texture is required to analyze the image accurately. In this particular work, we have used CIE-Luv and Daubechies wavelet transforms as color and texture descriptors respectively. Using the combined effect of a CIE-Luv color model and Daubechies transforms, we can segment color medical images precisely in a meaningful manner. The evaluation of the results is done through comparison of the segmentation quality with another similar alternative approach and it is found that the proposed approach is capable of producing more faithful segmentation.

The satellite image segmentation is a key area for current research and numerous work has been done for exploration of this area. The nature inspired optimization algorithms are very promising with image segmentation techniques to provide a platform for processing of satellite images. In this paper a literature review of different nature based optimization algorithms such as modified artificial bee colony (MABC) algorithm, ABC algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO), Darwinian PSO, genetic algorithm (GA), Wind driven optimization (WDO) and cuckoo search(CS) using different objective functions has been discussed to find the optimized multilevel thresholds. These nature influenced optimization methods and their performances are compared using different objective functions for optimal multilevel thresholding. The comparative study shows that the MABC algorithm and different variants of CS algorithm are very strong and accurate in results generating using image segmentation. Both methods search multilevel thresholds very efficiently and correctly, and in MABC an improved bee’s search solution are used and in CS the cuckoo search solution are used.

In order to overcome the poor anti-noise performance of traditional fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm in image segmentation, a novel improved FCM algorithm was proposed in this paper based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and Markov Random Field (MRF) model, which can make full use of the global searching ability of PSO and the spatial information integrating ability of MRF for image segmentation. In this algorithm, the image segmentation is converted to a PSO optimization problem, in which the fitness function is set up to containing the spatial information based on the spectral value and the neighboring pixels modeled by MRFs. And segmentation results can be iteratively obtained during the PSO iterations according to the newly designed membership function of FCM in which the spatial information is integrated. The experiments herein reported in this paper illustrate the better performance of this algorithm than the traditional FCM algorithm and the PSO algorithm for image segmentation.

Image recognition and image processing usually contain the technique of image segmentation. Excellent segmentation results can directly affect the accuracy of image recognition and processing. The essence of image segmentation is to segment each frame of a certain image or a video into multiple specific objects or regions and represent them with different labels. This paper focuses on the segmentation results obtained in image segmentation of images used for intelligent monitoring of Mandarin exams are usually visualized for image analysis. In this paper, we first investigate the performance improvement techniques for semantic segmentation in the image segmentation task for intelligent monitoring of Mandarin exams, improve the pixel classification capability by performing semantic migration, and, for the first time, extend the dataset substantially by style transformation to improve the model’s recognition of advanced features. In addition, to further address the shortcomings of the dataset, this paper improves the performance of image segmentation using synthetic datasets by investigating synthetic dataset image segmentation improvement techniques that reduce the reliance on manually annotated datasets. Image segmentation techniques continue to advance, and there are even thousands of commonly used segmentation methods for image segmentation development to date. Among them, they can be broadly classified as region-based segmentation methods, threshold-based segmentation methods, edge-based segmentation methods, specific theory-based segmentation methods, and deep learning-based segmentation methods. However, the methods used in this paper have all been experimentally demonstrated to improve the effectiveness of the techniques and proved to outperform other existing methods in the same field in the publicly available datasets LSUN, Cityscapes, and GTA5 datasets, respectively.

For the task of image recognition, it is unpractical to process an image as a whole, since it is highly inefficient and most of the times challenging for the users. Image segmentation techniques are used to divide one image into multiple regions or clusters, it consists in assigning regions to each of the image pixels using different metrics such as pixel colour value, gray-scale intensity, edge finding algorithms, among others. The most diverse image segmentation algorithms have already been proposed and are currently used. However, there are three main categories of segmentation to which the existing algorithms can be assigned and we are going to discuss in this survey: region-based segmentation, data clustering, and edge-based segmentation. With this document, we study diverse commonly used segmentation algorithms, analyse their behaviour as well as their benefits and disadvantages, and present comparative experimental results when applied to a test image.

A clustering method that is based on barebones particle swarm (BB) is developed in this paper. BB is a variant of particle swarm optimization (PSO) where parameter tuning is not required. The proposed algorithm finds the centroids of a user specified number of clusters, where each cluster groups together similar patterns. The application of the proposed clustering algorithm to the problem of unsupervised classification and segmentation of images is investigated. To illustrate its wide applicability, the proposed algorithms are then applied to synthetic, MRI and satellite images. Experimental results show that the BB-based clustering algorithm performs very well compared to other state-of-the-art clustering algorithms in all measured criteria.

Evolutionary and natural computing techniques have been drawn considerable interest for analyzing large datasets with large number of features. Various flavors of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been applied in the various research applications like Control and Automation, Function Optimization, Dimensionality Reduction, classification. In the present work, we have applied the SVM based classifier along with Novel PSO and Binary PSO on Huesken dataset of siRNA features as well as on nine other benchmark dataset and achieved results are quite satisfactory. The results of our study have been compared with other results available in the literature.

In day-to-day life, new technologies are emerging in the field of Image processing, especially in the domain of segmentation. Image segmentation is the most important part in digital image processing. Segmentation is nothing but a portion of any image and object. In image segmentation, the digital image is divided into multiple set of pixels. Image segmentation is generally required to cut out region of interest (ROI) from an image. Currently there are many different algorithms available for image segmentation. This chapter presents a brief outline of some of the most common segmentation techniques (e.g. Segmentation based on thresholding, Model based segmentation, Segmentation based on edge detection, Segmentation based on clustering, etc.,) mentioning its advantages as well as the drawbacks. The Matlab simulated results of different available image segmentation techniques are also given for better understanding of image segmentation. Simply, different image segmentation algorithms with their prospects are reviewed in this chapter to reduce the time of literature survey of the future researchers.

Segmentation is a low-level processing aimed at the partition of an image in disjoint regions, each one homogeneous with respect to some properties like intensity, texture, shape, etc. Such a task is needed in many high-level processing and applications in such diverse fields as remote-sensing, medical imaging, video coding, and industrial automation, just to name a few. In this work of thesis, we first deal with the problem of color based image segmentation, that is based on some form of homogeneity in the color/spectral properties of the image, and then move to the more complex task of texture based segmentation, where the aim is to recognize complex structures in the image which are typically non homogeneous in terms of spectral properties. Concerning color based segmentation, we focus on a specific class of Markov Random Field (MRF) probability models, namely the Tree-Structured Markov Random Fields (TS-MRF), recently proposed to provide a hierarchical multiscale description of images. Based on such a model, the unsupervised image segmentation is carried out by means of a sequence of nested class splits, where each class is modeled as a local binary MRF. As a first contribution, we first extend the model to generic tree structures removing the unnecessary binary constraint, and then devise a new TS-MRF unsupervised segmentation technique which improves upon the original algorithm by selecting a better tree structure and eliminating spurious classes. Such results are obtained by using the Mean-Shift procedure to estimate the number of pdf modes at each node, and to obtain a more reliable initial clustering for subsequent MRF optimization. To this end, we devise a new reliable and fast clustering algorithm based on the Mean-Shift technique, which makes use of a variable-bandwidth strategy based on the k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) technique, and is implemented with a speed-up strategy that cuts significantly the computational complexity. Experimental results on synthetic data and real life images from the remote sensing domain prove the potential of the proposed method. Turning to texture based segmentation, we present a novel multiscale texture model, and a related algorithm for the unsupervised segmentation of color images. Elementary textures are characterized by their spatial interactions with neighboring regions along selected directions. Such interactions are modeled in turn by means of a set of Markov chains, one for each direction, whose parameters are collected in a feature vector that synthetically describes the texture. Based on the feature vectors, the texture are then recursively merged, giving rise to larger and more complex textures, which appear at different scales of observation: accordingly, the model is named Hierarchical Multiple Markov Chain (H-MMC). The Texture Fragmentation and Reconstruction (TFR) algorithm, addresses the unsupervised segmentation problem based on the H-MMC model. The ``fragmentation'' step allows one to find the elementary textures of the model, while the ``reconstruction'' step defines the hierarchical image segmentation based on a probabilistic measure (texture score) which takes into account both region scale and inter-region interactions. The performance of the proposed method was assessed through the Prague segmentation benchmark, based on mosaics of real natural textures, and also tested on real-world natural images from the Berkeley dataset. Finally, an application of the TFR algorithm for the unsupervised segmentation of multiresolution remotely sensed images is proposed, based on the significant presence of textural content in last generation high-resolution satellite images. The obtained results further assess the potential of the proposed method for such real life applications.

Scale is a fundamental concept in computer vision and pattern recognition, especially in the fields of shape analysis, image segmentation, and registration. It represents the level of detail of object information in scenes. Global scale methods in image processing process the scene at each of various fixed scales and combine the results, as in scale space approaches. Local scale approaches define the largest homogeneous region at each point, and treat these as fundamental units. A similar dichotomy exists for describing shapes also. To vary the level of detail depending on application, it is desirable to be able to detect dominant points on shape boundaries at different scales. In this paper, we compare global and local scale approaches to shape analysis. For global scale, the Curvature Scale Space (CSS) method is selected, which is a state of the art shape descriptor, and is used in the MPEG-7 standard. The local scale approach is based on the notion of curvature-scale (c-scale), which is a new local scale concept that brings the idea of local morphometric scale (such as ball-, tensor-, and generalized scale) developed for images to the realm of boundaries. All previous methods of extracting dominant points lack this concept of a local scale. In this paper, we present a thorough evaluation of these global and local scale methods. Our analysis indicates that locally adaptive scale has advantages over global scale in shape description, just as it has also been demonstrated in image filtering, segmentation, and registration.