Generalized rough fuzzy c-means algorithm for brain MR image segmentation

Fuzzy sets and rough sets have been widely used in many clustering algorithms for medical image segmentation, and have recently been combined together to better deal with the uncertainty implied in observed image data. Despite of their wide spread applications, traditional hybrid approaches are sensitive to the empirical weighting parameters and random initialization, and hence may produce less accurate results. In this paper, a novel hybrid clustering approach, namely the generalized rough fuzzy c-means (GRFCM) algorithm is proposed for brain MR image segmentation. In this algorithm, each cluster is characterized by three automatically determined rough-fuzzy regions, and accordingly the membership of each pixel is estimated with respect to the region it locates. The importance of each region is balanced by a weighting parameter, and the bias field in MR images is modeled by a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials. The weighting parameter estimation and bias field correction have been incorporated into the iterative clustering process. Our algorithm has been compared to the existing rough c-means and hybrid clustering algorithms in both synthetic and clinical brain MR images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more robust to the initialization, noise, and bias field, and can produce more accurate and reliable segmentations.     

基于改进的直觉模糊核聚类的图像分割方法

针对噪声图像模糊性的本质，提出了基于改进的直觉模糊核聚类的图像分割方法。采用直觉模糊集描述噪声图像包含的不确定性信息，将图像的灰度信息转换到直觉模糊域进行处理；将模糊核聚类拓展为直觉模糊核聚类，在图像的直觉模糊域进行聚类；通过高斯核函数和欧氏距离分别对像素8-邻域的灰度和空间信息进行建模，综合平衡灰度和空间信息对聚类的作用，并将其作为惩罚项加入到直觉模糊核聚类的目标函数中；通过梯度下降法，推导了迭代求解算法；通过典型的合成图像和自然图像分割实例，验证了所提算法的有效性和鲁棒性。     

Soft fuzzy rough set-based MR brain image segmentation

Fuzzy sets, rough sets are efficient tools to handle uncertainty and vagueness in the medical images and are widely used for medical image segmentation. Soft sets are a new mathematical approach to uncertainty and vagueness. In this paper, a hybrid segmentation algorithm based on soft sets namely soft fuzzy rough c-means is proposed to extract the white matter, gray matter and the cerebro spinal fluid from MR brain image with bias field correction. In this algorithm, soft fuzzy rough approximations are applied to obtain the rough regions of image. These approximations are free from defining thresholds, weight parameters and are less complex compared to the existing rough set based algorithms. Soft sets use similarity coefficients to find the similarity of the clusters formed in present and previous step. The proposed algorithm does not involve any negative region, hence all the pixels participate in clustering avoiding clustering mistakes. Also, the histogram based centroids choose the centroids close to the ground truth that in turn effect the definition of approximations, standardizing the clusters. The proposed algorithm evaluated through simulation, compared it with existing k-means, rough k-means, fuzzy c-means and other hybrid algorithms. The soft fuzzy rough c-means algorithm outperforms the considered algorithms in all analyzed scenarios even in extracting the tumor from the brain tissue.     

Intuitionistic fuzzy MST clustering algorithms

In this paper, we investigate graph theory-based clustering techniques for Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets (A-IFSs) and interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs). We start by introducing the concepts of graph, minimum spanning tree (MST), A-IFS, and intuitionistic fuzzy distance, and develop two intuitionistic fuzzy MST clustering algorithms ( and ). Then we extend Algorithm II for clustering IVIFSs, and show the effectiveness of our algorithms through some numerical experiments.     

基于直觉模糊聚类的数据关联算法

针对多传感器观测数据存在不确定性的问题,基于直觉模糊聚类,提出一种新的数据关联算法。将改进的直觉模糊C-均值聚类（IFCM）算法应用于数据关联,首先将观测数据和预测数据进行直觉模糊化,然后计算直觉模糊集之间的加权距离以获得观测与航迹的隶属度,最后依次搜索最大隶属度实现观测与航迹的关联。仿真实验表明,存在模糊观测数据情况下,算法能有效地进行数据关联。     

Interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy cosine similarity measures for multiple attribute decision-making

In this work, considering all information carried by the membership degrees, nonmembership degree, and hesitancy degree in interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) as 3-D vector representations, we propose a cosine similarity measure and a weighted cosine similarity measure for IVIFSs based on the extension of the cosine similarity measure (angular coefficient) between intuitionistic fuzzy sets in 2-D vector space. Then, the weighted cosine similarity measure for IVIFSs is applied to multiple attribute decision-making problems under the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy environment. Through the similarity measure between the ideal alternative and each alternative, the ranking order of all alternatives can be determined and the best alternative can be easily identified as well. Finally, two illustrative examples are given to demonstrate the applications and efficiency of the proposed decision-making method.     

二型模糊系统的规则提取算法

模糊规则提取是建立二型模糊系统需要解决的关键问题.提出一种改进的基于c均值模糊聚类算法(FCM)的二型模糊规则提取方法.该方法借助于二型模糊集主隶属度函数的期望与次隶属度函数值之间的联系,能克服已有算法忽略二型模糊集次隶属度函数对模糊聚类结果的影响.仿真实例表明.该算法能成功地提取二型模糊规则,比FCMV算法具有更好的性能和收敛性.     

A thresholding method based on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets: an application to image segmentation

This paper proposes a new fuzzy approach for the segmentation of images. L-interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) are constructed from two L-fuzzy sets that corresponds to the foreground (object) and the background of an image. Here, L denotes the number of gray levels in the image. The length of the membership interval of IVIFS quantifies the influence of the ignorance in the construction of the membership function. Threshold for an image is chosen by finding an IVIFS with least entropy. Contributions also include a comparative study with ten other image segmentation techniques. The results obtained by each method have been systematically evaluated using well-known measures for judging the segmentation quality. The proposed method has globally shown better results in all these segmentation quality measures. Experiments also show that the results acquired from the proposed method are highly correlated to the ground truth images.     

基于加权直觉模糊集合的聚类模型

针对已有基于直觉模糊集的聚类方法的局限性,提出了一种基于加权直觉模糊集合的聚类模型——WIFSCM。在该模型中,提出了特定特征空间下的等价样本和加权直觉模糊集合的概念;并推导出基于等价样本和加权直觉模糊集合的直觉模糊聚类算法的目标函数,利用该目标函数推导出直觉模糊聚类中心迭代算法和隶属度矩阵迭代算法;定义了基于加权直觉模糊集合的密度函数,确定了初始聚类中心,减少了迭代次数。通过灰度图像分割实验,证明了该模型的有效性,同时与普通直觉模糊集FCM聚类算法(IFCM)相比,聚类速度提高近百倍。     

Generalized weighted conditional fuzzy clustering

Fuzzy clustering helps to find natural vague boundaries in data. The fuzzy c-means method is one of the most popular clustering methods based on minimization of a criterion function. Among many existing modifications of this method, conditional or context-dependent c-means is the most interesting one. In this method, data vectors are clustered under conditions based on linguistic terms represented by fuzzy sets. This paper introduces a family of generalized weighted conditional fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms. This family include both the well-known fuzzy c-means method and the conditional fuzzy c-means method. Performance of the new clustering algorithm is experimentally compared with fuzzy c-means using synthetic data with outliers and the Box-Jenkins database.     

Hadoop based uncertain possibilistic kernelized c-means algorithms for image segmentation and a comparative analysis

Over the years data clustering algorithms have been used for image segmentation. Due to the presence of uncertainty in real life datasets, several uncertainty based data clustering algorithms have been developed. The c-means clustering algorithms form one such family of algorithms. Starting with the fuzzy c-means (FCM) a subfamily of this family comprises of rough c-means (RCM), intuitionistic fuzzy c-means (IFCM) and their hybrids like rough fuzzy c-means (RFCM) and rough intuitionistic fuzzy c-means (RIFCM). In the basic subfamily of this family of algorithms, the Euclidean distance was being used to measure the similarity of data. However, the sub family of algorithms obtained replacing the Euclidean distance by kernel based similarities produced better results. Especially, these algorithms were useful in handling viably cluster data points which are linearly inseparable in original input space. During this period it was inferred by Krishnapuram and Keller that the membership constraints in some rudimentary uncertainty based clustering techniques like fuzzy c-means imparts them a probabilistic nature, hence they suggested its possibilistic version. In fact all the other member algorithms from basic subfamily have been extended to incorporate this new notion. Currently, the use of image data is growing vigorously and constantly, accounting to huge figures leading to big data. Moreover, since image segmentation happens to be one of the most time consuming processes, industries are in the need of algorithms which can solve this problem at a rapid pace and with high accuracy. In this paper, we propose to combine the notions of kernel and possibilistic approach together in a distributed environment provided by Apache™ Hadoop. We integrate this combined notion with map-reduce paradigm of Hadoop and put forth three novel algorithms; Hadoop based possibilistic kernelized rough c-means (HPKRCM), Hadoop based possibilistic kernelized rough fuzzy c-means (HPKRFCM) and Hadoop based possibilistic kernelized rough intuitionistic fuzzy c-means (HPKRIFCM) and study their efficiency in image segmentation. We compare their running times and analyze their efficiencies with the corresponding algorithms from the other three sub families on four different types of images, three different kernels and six different efficiency measures; the Davis Bouldin index (DB), Dunn index (D), alpha index (α), rho index (ρ), alpha star index (α*) and gamma index (γ). Our analysis shows that the hyper-tangent kernel with Hadoop based possibilistic kernelized rough intuitionistic fuzzy c-means is the best one for image segmentation among all these clustering algorithms. Also, the times taken to render segmented images by the proposed algorithms are drastically low in comparison to the other algorithms. The implementations of the algorithms have been carried out in Java and for the proposed algorithms we have used Hadoop framework installed on CentOS. For statistical plotting we have used matplotlib (python library).     

A Modified Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm for Brain MR Image Segmentation and Bias Field Correction

In quantitative brain image analysis, accurate brain tissue segmentation from brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) is a critical step. It is considered to be the most important and difficult issue in the field of medical image processing. The quality of MR images is influenced by partial volume effect, noise, and intensity inhomogeneity, which render the segmentation task extremely challenging. We present a novel fuzzy c-means algorithm (RCLFCM) for segmentation and bias field correction of brain MR images. We employ a new gray-difference coefficient and design a new impact factor to measure the effect of neighbor pixels, so that the robustness of anti-noise can be enhanced. Moreover, we redefine the objective function of FCM (fuzzy c-means) by adding the bias field estimation model to overcome the intensity inhomogeneity in the image and segment the brain MR images simultaneously. We also construct a new spatial function by combining pixel gray value dissimilarity with its membership, and make full use of the space information between pixels to update the membership. Compared with other state-of-the-art approaches by using similarity accuracy on synthetic MR images with different levels of noise and intensity inhomogeneity, the proposed algorithm generates the results with high accuracy and robustness to noise.     

FCM融合改进的GSA算法在医学图像分割中的研究

医学图像由于具有复杂性,在对其进行图像分割时存在很大的不确定性,为了提高模糊c均值聚类算法(FCM)在处理医学图像分割时的性能,提出一种新的混合方法进行图像分割。利用FCM算法将图像像素分成均匀的区域,融合引力搜索算法,将改进的引力搜索算法纳入模糊c均值聚类算法中,以找到最优聚类中心,使模糊c均值聚类的适应度函数值最小,从而提高分割效果。实验结果表明,相对于传统的聚类算法,所提算法在分割复杂的医学图像方面更具有效性。     

Fuzzy c-means improvement using relaxed constraints support vector machines

Fuzzy clustering is a widely applied method for extracting the underlying models within data. It has been applied successfully in many real-world applications. Fuzzy c-means is one of the most popular fuzzy clustering methods because it produces reasonable results and its implementation is straightforward. One problem with all fuzzy clustering algorithms such as fuzzy c-means is that some data points which are assigned to some clusters have low membership values. It is possible that many samples may be assigned to a cluster with low-confidence. In this paper, an efficient and noise-aware implementation of support vector machines, namely relaxed constraints support vector machines, is used to solve the mentioned problem and improve the performance of fuzzy c-means algorithm. First, fuzzy c-means partitions data into appropriate clusters. Then, the samples with high membership values in each cluster are selected for training a multi-class relaxed constraints support vector machine classifier. Finally, the class labels of the remaining data points are predicted by the latter classifier. The performance of the proposed clustering method is evaluated by quantitative measures such as cluster entropy and Minkowski scores. Experimental results on real-life data sets show the superiority of the proposed method.     

Strong fuzzy c-means in medical image data analysis

This paper presents a robust fuzzy c-means (FCM) for an automatic effective segmentation of breast and brain magnetic resonance images (MRI). This paper obtains novel objective functions for proposed robust fuzzy c-means by replacing original Euclidean distance with properties of kernel function on feature space and using Tsallis entropy. By minimizing the proposed effective objective functions, this paper gets membership partition matrices and equations for successive prototypes. In order to reduce the computational complexity and running time, center initialization algorithm is introduced for initializing the initial cluster center. The initial experimental works have done on synthetic image and benchmark dataset to investigate the effectiveness of proposed, and then the proposed method has been implemented to differentiate the different region of real breast and brain magnetic resonance images. In order to identify the validity of proposed fuzzy c-means methods, segmentation accuracy is computed by using silhouette method. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more capable in segmentation of medical images than existed methods.     

A new generalized improved score function of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets and applications in expert systems

The objective of this paper is divided into two folds. Firstly, a new generalized improved score function has been presented in the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) environment by incorporating the idea of weighted average of the degree of hesitation between their membership functions. Secondly, an IVIFSs based method for solving the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem has been presented with completely unknown attribute weights. A ranking of the different attributes is based on the proposed generalized improved score functions and the sensitivity analysis on the ranking of the system has been done based on the decision-making parameters. An illustrative examples have been studied to show that the proposed function is more reasonable in the decision-making process than other existing functions.     

Optimal-selection-based suppressed fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm with self-tuning non local spatial information for image segmentation

Suppressed fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm (S-FCM) is one of the most effective fuzzy clustering algorithms. Even if S-FCM has some advantages, some problems exist. First, it is unreasonable to compulsively modify the membership degree values for all the data points in each iteration step of S-FCM. Furthermore, duo to only utilizing the spatial information derived from the pixel’s neighborhood window to guide the process of image segmentation, S-FCM cannot obtain satisfactory segmentation results on images heavily corrupted by noise. This paper proposes an optimal-selection-based suppressed fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm with self-tuning non local spatial information for image segmentation to solve the above drawbacks of S-FCM. Firstly, an optimal-selection-based suppressed strategy is presented to modify the membership degree values for data points. In detail, during each iteration step, all the data points are ranked based on their biggest membership degree values, and then the membership degree values of the top r ranked data points are modified while the membership degree values of the other data points are not changed. In this paper, the parameter r is determined by the golden section method. Secondly, a novel gray level histogram is constructed by using the self-tuning non local spatial information for each pixel, and then fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm with the optimal-selection-based suppressed strategy is executed on this histogram. The self-tuning non local spatial information of a pixel is derived from the pixels with a similar neighborhood configuration to the given pixel and can preserve more information of the image than the spatial information derived from the pixel’s neighborhood window. This method is applied to Berkeley and other real images heavily contaminated by noise. The image segmentation experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other fuzzy algorithms.     

基于直觉模糊的ISODATA算法

ISODATA算法能自动地进行类的分裂和合并,但这种硬分类算法没有充分考虑图像本身的特点和人类的视觉特性,其分类效果一般差于模糊聚类算法。而大多数模糊识别方法都需要设置类别数目,有其自身的缺点,而直觉模糊则弥补了传统模糊理论不足。结合直觉模糊和ISODATA优点,将与隶属度和非隶属度相关的判定函数作为分类度量,提出了一种基于直觉模糊的ISODATA算法,结合实际改进了隶属度函数,以区域为待分类样本以提高算法速度,将其应用到图像分割,经实验证明了算法的有效性。     

基于MS-FCM算法的MR图像分割方法

针对传统模糊C-均值(FCM)聚类算法在分割低信噪比图像时准确性较差的问题,提出一种用于MR图像分割的改进算法MS-FCM。针对脑部MR图像相邻像素属于同一分类的模糊隶属度相近的特性,在迭代过程中对隶属度数据集进行滤波,以降低噪声对聚类精度的影响。模拟脑部MR图像和临床脑部MR图像的分割实验证明,该算法可以提高图像分割精度。     

自适应直觉模糊相异直方图裁剪的图像增强算法

针对经典的直方图均衡化图像增强算法可能存在的对比度过度增强、亮度分布不均匀和细节信息不突出等问题,提出自适应直觉模糊相异直方图裁剪的图像增强算法.基于直觉模糊集的“投票模型”,引入直觉模糊相异直方图的概念,并基于此提取图像像素的空间位置信息.同时,利用S型隶属度函数对图像直觉模糊相异直方图进行自适应裁剪,采用分段策略对裁剪后的直觉模糊相异直方图进行均衡化处理.最后,利用直觉模糊集的犹豫度刻画原图像的未知信息,修正由引导滤波获得的细节图像,从而保留图像丰富的细节信息.针对3种类型的图像,即自然图像、MRI脑图像及近红外图像的实验结果表明,所提出算法能够有效提高图像的对比度,保留图像的细节信息,使图像呈现较自然的视觉效果,改善图像的质量评价指标.