A Cluster Number Adaptive Fuzzy c-means Algorithm for Image Segmentation

Aiming at partitioning an image into homogeneous and meaningful regions, automatic image segmentation is a fundamental but challenging problem in computer vision. It is well known that Fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is one of the most popular methods for image segmentation. However, the FCM-based image segmentation algorithm must be manually estimated to determine cluster number by users. In this paper, we propose a novel cluster number adaptive fuzzy c-means image segmentation algorithm (CNAFCM) for automatically grouping the pixels of an image into different homogeneous regions when the cluster number is not known beforehand. We utilize the Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) feature extracted at the image block level instead of at the pixel level to estimate the cluster number, which is used as initialization parameter of the following FCM clustering to endow the novel segmentation algorithm adaptively. We cluster image pixels according to their corresponding Gabor feature vectors to improve the compactness of the clusters and form final homogeneous regions. Experimental results show that proposed CNAFCM algorithm not only can spontaneously estimate the appropriate number of clusters but also can get better segmentation quality, in compare with those FCM-based segmentation methods recently proposed in the literature.