Atlantis Press Paper Details: A fast fuzzy c-means algorithm for color image segmentation

Color image segmentation is a fundamental task in many computer vision problems. A common approach is to use fuzzy iterative clustering algorithms that provide a partition of the pixels into a given number of clusters. However, most of these algorithms present several drawbacks: they are time consuming, and sensitive to initialization and noise. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy c-means algorithm aiming at correcting such drawbacks. It relies on a new efficient cluster centers initialization and color quantization allowing faster and more accurate convergence such that it is suitable to segment very large color images. Thanks to color quantization and a new spatial regularization, the proposed algorithm is also more robust. Experiments on real images show the efficiency in terms of both accuracy and computation time of the proposed algorithm as compared to recent methods of the literature.

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title:		A fast fuzzy c-means algorithm for color image segmentation
publication:		EUSFLAT
part of series:		Advances in Intelligent Systems Research
pages:		1074 - 1081
DOI:		To be assigned soon (how to use a DOI)
author(s):		Hoel Le, Carl Fr¨¦licot
publication date:		July 2011
abstract:		Color image segmentation is a fundamental task in many computer vision problems. A common approach is to use fuzzy iterative clustering algorithms that provide a partition of the pixels into a given number of clusters. However, most of these algorithms present several drawbacks: they are time consuming, and sensitive to initialization and noise. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy c-means algorithm aiming at correcting such drawbacks. It relies on a new efficient cluster centers initialization and color quantization allowing faster and more accurate convergence such that it is suitable to segment very large color images. Thanks to color quantization and a new spatial regularization, the proposed algorithm is also more robust. Experiments on real images show the efficiency in terms of both accuracy and computation time of the proposed algorithm as compared to recent methods of the literature.
copyright:		© Atlantis Press. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
full text:		eusflatlfa2011_RS_36.pdf (3622 K)