Multi-view fuzzy C-means clustering with kernel metric and local information for color image segmentation

Image segmentation plays an important role in machine vision, image recognition, and imaging applications. Based on the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm, a kernel-distance-based intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering (KIFCM) algorithm is proposed. First, a fuzzy complement operator is used to generate the membership degree whereby the hesitation degree of intuitionistic fuzzy set is generated; second, a kernel-induced function is used to calculate the distance from each point to the cluster center instead of the Euclidean distance; third, a new objective function that includes the hesitation degree is established, and the optimization of the objective function results in new iterative expressions for the membership degree and the cluster center. The proposed KIFCM algorithm is compared with the fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm, the kernel fuzzy c-means clustering (KFCM) algorithm, and the intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering (IFCM) algorithm in segmenting five images. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed KIFCM algorithm.

As fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm is
\nsensitive to noise, local spatial information is often introduced
\nto an objective function to improve the robustness of the FCM
\nalgorithm for image segmentation. However, the introduction of
\nlocal spatial information often leads to a high computational
\ncomplexity, arising out of an iterative calculation of the distance
\nbetween pixels within local spatial neighbors and clustering
\ncenters. To address this issue, an improved FCM algorithm
\nbased on morphological reconstruction and membership filtering
\n(FRFCM) that is significantly faster and more robust than FCM,
\nis proposed in this paper. Firstly, the local spatial information
\nof images is incorporated into FRFCM by introducing morphological
\nreconstruction operation to guarantee noise-immunity
\nand image detail-preservation. Secondly, the modification of
\nmembership partition, based on the distance between pixels
\nwithin local spatial neighbors and clustering centers, is replaced
\nby local membership filtering that depends only on the spatial
\nneighbors of membership partition. Compared to state-of-theart
\nalgorithms, the proposed FRFCM algorithm is simpler and
\nsignificantly faster, since it is unnecessary to compute the distance
\nbetween pixels within local spatial neighbors and clustering
\ncenters. In addition, it is efficient for noisy image segmentation
\nbecause membership filtering are able to improve membership
\npartition matrix efficiently. Experiments performed on synthetic
\nand real-world images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm
\nnot only achieves better results, but also requires less time than
\nstate-of-the-art algorithms for image segmentation.

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] The possibilistic c-means (PCM) was developed as an extension of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm by abandoning the membership sum-to-one constraint. In the PCM, each cluster is independent of the other clusters and can be processed separately. Because of this separability, the sequential possibilistic one-mean (SP1M) was proposed to find clusters sequentially by running the possibilistic one-mean (P1M) c times. One critical problem in both PCM and SP1M is how to determine the parameter [subscript]. The sequential possibilistic one-mean with adaptive eta (SP1M-AE) was developed to allow [subscript] to change during iterations. In this thesis, a new dynamic adaptation mechanism for the parameter [subscript] in each cluster is inserted into SP1M. The resultant algorithm, called the sequential possibilistic one-mean with dynamic eta (SP1M-DE) is shown to provide superior performance over PCM, SP1M, and SP1M-AE in determining correct clustering results. In this thesis, the family of the SP1M clustering algorithm is also extended to combine local spatial information in an image. The resultant algorithm, called sequential possibilistic local information one-mean (SPLI1M) is shown to have a better performance on image segmentation over the fuzzy local information c-means (FLICM), the possibilistic local information c-means (PLICM), and the family of SP1M without combing local spatial information in image.

There is always much difficult in the MR image segmentation. Although fuzzy c-means(FCM) clustering algorithm has been widely used in the field of image segmentation study, some inherent deficiencies of this algorithm especially the high cost of computation made the algorithm to be difficult widely used in practice. A novel algorithm, based on kernel fuzzy c-means (KFCM) clustering algorithm and the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm, is proposed to improve the performance of MR image segmentation. In this algorithm, the statistical gray level histogram of image is used in KFCM algorithm to speed up the algorithm. Furthermore, the spatial information of image is also considered by k-nearest neighbor algorithm based on kernel methods. With kernel methods each pixel of image is mapped into a high-dimensional feature space where FCM algorithm and KNN algorithm are carried out. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient in image segmentation.

An image segmentation method based on a modified local-information weighted intuitionistic Fuzzy C-means clustering and Gold-panning Algorithm

Chapter 4 - Comparative analysis of filtering methods in fuzzy C-means: Environment for DICOM image segmentation

Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is an important and popular clustering algorithm which is utilized in various application domains such as pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining. Although this algorithm has shown acceptable performance in diverse problems, the current literature does not have studies about how they can improve the clustering quality of partitions with overlapping classes. The better the clustering quality of a partition, the better is the interpretation of the data, which is essential to understand real problems. This work proposes two robust FCM algorithms to prevent ambiguous membership into clusters. For this, we compute two types of weights: an weight to avoid the problem of overlapping clusters; and other weight to enable the algorithm to identify clusters of different shapes. We perform a study with synthetic datasets, where each one contains classes of different shapes and different degrees of overlapping. Moreover, the study considered real application datasets. Our results indicate such weights are effective to reduce the ambiguity of membership assignments thus generating a better data interpretation.

Fast and robust fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms incorporating local information for image segmentation

In this study, the concepts of competitive agglomeration clustering algorithm is incorporated into fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm for symbolic interval-values data. In the proposed approach, called as IFCMwUNC clustering algorithm, the problems of the unknown clusters number and the initialization of prototypes in the FCM clustering algorithm for symbolic interval-values data are overcome and discussed. Due to the competitive agglomeration clustering algorithm possess the advantages of the hierarchical clustering algorithm and the partitional clustering algorithm, IFCMwUNC clustering algorithm can be fast converges in a few iterations regardless of the initial number of clusters. Moreover, it is also converges to the same optimal partition regardless of its initialization. Experiments results show the merits and usefulness of IFCMwUNC clustering algorithm for the symbolic interval-values data.

Aiming at the problem that traditional fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is susceptible to noise in processing noisy images, a noisy image segmentation method based on FCM wavelet domain feature enhancement is proposed. Firstly, the noise image is decomposed by two-dimensional wavelet. Secondly, the edge enhancement of the approximate coefficient is carried out, and the artificial fish swarm (AFS) optimization algorithm is used to process the threshold value of the detail coefficient, and the processed coefficient is reconstructed by wavelet transform. Finally, the reconstructed image is segmented by FCM algorithm. Five typical gray-scale images are selected by adding Gaussian noise and Salt& pepper noise, respectively, and segmented by various methods. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and error rate (MR) of segmented images are used as performance indexes. Experimental results show that compared with traditional FCM clustering algorithm segmentation method, particle swarm optimization (PSO) segmentation method and other methods, the indexes of image segmentation by the proposed method is greatly improved. It can be seen that the proposed segmentation method retains the texture information of image edge well, and its anti-noise performance and segmentation performance are improved.

Gold immunochromatographic strip (GICS) quantitative detective can provide more information than the qualitative or semiquantitative testing. In this paper, a fast color image segmentation method is presented to develop the quantitative detective of GICS. The image of GICS was acquired by Charge-coupled Device (CCD) image sensor, and segmented by fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm based on color histogram in HSV color space. Maximin-distance algorithm was adopted to get the initial positions of centroids and cluster number to overcome the shortcoming that the FCM algorithm may produce local optimal results. For the segmented target image, a special characteristic parameter was constructed and calculated in HSV color space to achieve the quantitative interpretation of the GICS.

Possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering (PFCM) algorithm improves the noise sensitivity of the fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm and the serious coincident clustering phenomenon of the possibilistic c-means clustering (PCM) algorithm. However, the Euclidean distance of the PFCM treats all features equally in the clustering process and doesn't consider the imbalance between sample features, resulting in low clustering accuracy. Furthermore, as the number of clusters increases, the PFCM still has a partially coincident clustering problem due to the lack of between-class relationships of possibilistic memberships. Therefore, a feature weighted cutset-type possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering (FW-C-PFCM) algorithm is proposed by introducing the cutset theory and feature weights into the PFCM in this paper. Firstly, the proposed FW-C-PFCM introduces a feature weighted parameter in the objective function, and different features should take different weight values according to the distribution of samples. Secondly, the cutset theory is utilized to divide the data into inner core and outer core regions, and some possibilistic memberships inside each cluster core are modified in the iterative process. Finally, the experiments on synthetic multi-class datasets and the Iris dataset show that the FW-C-PFCM improves the partially coincident clustering phenomenon and overcomes the imbalance between sample features. The comparative experiments on a color image also indicate that the FW-C-PFCM enhances the segmentation accuracy and generates better clustering results than PFCM.

An image segmentation method based on optimized spatial texture information is proposed in this article. Spatial information, including the relative position of neighbouring pixels and texture features of the multiscale neighbourhood, is incorporated into the similarity measure of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm, in which the Gaussian kernel is adopted to diminish the local incorrect segmentation. The FCM clustering is spatially adjusted and optimized by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The purpose of optimization is to obtain the appropriate control parameters influencing spatial information, which can improve segmentation results. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better segmentation performance and is capable of effectively segmenting synthetic images and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.

In this paper, we propose an approach to detection and segmentation of liver tumors in noisy computed topography (CT) images. Image segmentation plays crucial role in medical image processing applications. Noise is quite common in medical images. It occurs while acquisition and transmission of images. The essential goal of this framework is to identify liver cancer by segmenting liver tumors from noisy CT scan images. Liver segmentation is difficult task in medical applications because inter-patient variability in size, shape and disease. In general CT scanning is used to inspect liver cancer. In this research work, the liver tumors are detected by the medical images in three stages, pre-processing stage, processing stage and detection stage. First in pre-processing stage, median filter is used to remove the noise from CT image, and then the denoised image is segmented by fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm. Finally in the detection stage distance regularized level set evolution (DRLSE) is used to extract tumor boundaries. This algorithm is very much useful for identifying hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer). Experimental results on various noisy CT scan images show that the proposed method is efficient for extracting hepatic tumors from liver.

This paper presents a new technique for incorporating local membership information into the standard fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering algorithm. In this technique, the objective consists of minimizing the classical FCM function with a unity fuzzifier exponent plus the Kullback-Leibler (KL) information distance acting as a fuzzification and regularization term. The KL distance is proposed to measure the proximity between cluster membership function of a pixel and an average of the cluster membership functions of immediate neighborhood pixels. Therefore, minimizing this KL distance biases the cluster membership of the pixel toward this smoothed membership function of the local neighborhoods. This can provide immunity against noise and results in clustered images with piecewise homogeneous regions. Results of clustering and segmentation of synthetic and real-world medical images are presented to compare the performance of the proposed local membership KL information based FCM (LMKLFCM) and the standard FCM, a local data information based FCM (LDFCM) and a type of local membership information based FCM (LMFCM) algorithms.