MapReduce-based fast fuzzy c-means algorithm for large-scale underwater image segmentation

The research on underwater image segmentation has to deal with the rapid increasing volume of images and videos. To handle this issue, parallel computing paradigms, such as the MapReduce framework has been proven as a viable solution. Therefore, we propose a MapReduce-based fast fuzzy c-means algorithm (MRFFCM) to paralyze the segmentation of the images. In our work, we use a two-layer distribution model to group the large-scale images and adopt an iterative MapReduce process to parallelize the FFCM algorithm. A combinational segmentation way is used to improve algorithm’s efficiency. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, we develop a small Hadoop cluster to test the MRFFCM algorithm. The experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method is effective and efficient on large-scale images. When compared to the traditional non-parallel methods, our algorithm can be expected to provide a more efficient segmentation on images with at least 13% improvement. Meanwhile, with the growth of cluster size, further improvement of the algorithm performance was also achieved. Consequently, such scalability can enable our proposed method to be used effectively in oceanic research, such as in underwater data processing systems.     

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.     

Robust spatially constrained fuzzy c-means algorithm for brain MR image segmentation

Objective

Accurate brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance (MR) images is an essential step in quantitative brain image analysis, and hence has attracted extensive research attention. However, due to the existence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity in brain MR images, many segmentation algorithms suffer from limited robustness to outliers, over-smoothness for segmentations and limited segmentation accuracy for image details. To further improve the accuracy for brain MR image segmentation, a robust spatially constrained fuzzy c-means (RSCFCM) algorithm is proposed in this paper.

Method

Firstly, a novel spatial factor is proposed to overcome the impact of noise in the images. By incorporating the spatial information amongst neighborhood pixels, the proposed spatial factor is constructed based on the posterior probabilities and prior probabilities, and takes the spatial direction into account. It plays a role as linear filters for smoothing and restoring images corrupted by noise. Therefore, the proposed spatial factor is fast and easy to implement, and can preserve more details. Secondly, the negative log-posterior is utilized as dissimilarity function by taking the prior probabilities into account, which can further improve the ability to identify the class for each pixel. Finally, to overcome the impact of intensity inhomogeneity, we approximate the bias field at the pixel-by-pixel level by using a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials. The fuzzy objective function is then integrated with the bias field estimation model to overcome the intensity inhomogeneity in the image and segment the brain MR images simultaneously.

Results

To demonstrate the performances of the proposed algorithm for the images with/without skull stripping, the first group of experiments is carried out in clinical 3T-weighted brain MR images which contain quite serious intensity inhomogeneity and noise. Then we quantitatively compare our algorithm to state-of-the-art segmentation approaches by using Jaccard similarity on benchmark images obtained from IBSR and BrainWeb with different level of noise and intensity inhomogeneity. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can produce higher accuracy segmentation and has stronger ability of denoising, especially in the area with abundant textures and details.

Conclusion

In this paper, the RSCFCM algorithm is proposed by utilizing the negative log-posterior as the dissimilarity function, introducing a novel factor and integrating the bias field estimation model into the fuzzy objective function. This algorithm successfully overcomes the drawbacks of existing FCM-type clustering schemes and EM-type mixture models. Our statistical results (mean and standard deviation of Jaccard similarity for each tissue) on both synthetic and clinical images show that the proposed algorithm can overcome the difficulties caused by noise and bias fields, and is capable of improving over 5% segmentation accuracy comparing with several state-of-the-art algorithms.     

An enhanced fuzzy c-means algorithm for audio segmentation and classification

Automated audio segmentation and classification play important roles in multimedia content analysis. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach, called the correlation intensive fuzzy c-means (CIFCM) algorithm, to audio segmentation and classification that is based on audio content analysis. While conventional methods work by considering the attributes of only the current frame or segment, the proposed CIFCM algorithm efficiently incorporates the influence of neighboring frames or segments in the audio stream. With this method, audio-cuts can be detected efficiently even when the signal contains audio effects such as fade-in, fade-out, and cross-fade. A number of audio features are analyzed in this paper to explore the differences between various types of audio data. The proposed CIFCM algorithm works by detecting the boundaries between different kinds of sounds and classifying them into clusters such as silence, speech, music, speech with music, and speech with noise. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art FCM approach in terms of audio segmentation and classification.     

基于模糊C均值的图像分割

图像分割的质量直接影响后期的图像分析、识别和解释的质量。本文主要研究了基于模糊c均值算法的图像分割,它通过优化目标函数得到每个样本点对所有类中心的隶属度,从而决定样本点的类属以达到自动对样本数据进行分类的目的。实验结果表明文中用到的图像分割算法对图像分割的效果均优于对比算法的分割效果。     

Parameter optimization of improved fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for brain MR image segmentation

A traditional approach to segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images is the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm. The efficacy of FCM algorithm considerably reduces in the case of noisy data. In order to improve the performance of FCM algorithm, researchers have introduced a neighborhood attraction, which is dependent on the relative location and features of neighboring pixels. However, determination of degree of attraction is a challenging task which can considerably affect the segmentation results.This paper presents a study investigating the potential of genetic algorithms (GAs) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to determine the optimum value of degree of attraction. The GAs are best at reaching a near optimal solution but have trouble finding an exact solution, while PSO’s-group interactions enhances the search for an optimal solution. Therefore, significant improvements are expected using a hybrid method combining the strengths of PSO with GAs, simultaneously. In this context, a hybrid GAs/PSO (breeding swarms) method is employed for determination of optimum degree of attraction. The quantitative and qualitative comparisons performed on simulated and real brain MR images with different noise levels demonstrate unprecedented improvements in segmentation results compared to other FCM-based methods.     

An optimized SVM based possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for tumor segmentation

Multimedia Tools and Applications - To design an efficient partial differential equation-based total variation method for denoising and possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for...     

GPU fuzzy c-means algorithm implementations: performance analysis on medical image segmentation

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Image segmentation in the medical imagery such as MRI, is an essential step to the sensitive analysis of human tissues lesions with the objective to improve the...     

基于空间信息的可能性模糊C均值聚类遥感图像分割

可能性模糊C均值(PFCM)聚类算法作为模糊C均值(FCM)聚类算法的一种改进算法,能在一定程度上克服FCM算法对噪声的敏感性;但由于PFCM没有考虑像元间的空间信息,对含有较大噪声的图像分割效果依然不理想。为此,提出一种新的基于空间信息的PFCM算法(SPFCM),克服了PFCM算法对含有较大噪声的图像分割效果不佳的缺点。通过对人工图像和IKONOS遥感图像进行分析,结果表明,SPFCM算法无论是在视觉上还是在分割正确率上都优于传统的FCM算法、PFCM算法及两种加入空间信息的FCM算法;对于含有高斯噪声和盐椒噪声的图像,平均分割正确率高达99.71%,是一种去噪效果较好的图像分割算法。     

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.     

一种自适应的模糊C均值聚类图像分割方法

针对传统的模糊C均值聚类算法(FCM)在图像分割中对噪声十分敏感这一局限性,提出一种自适应的FCM图像分割方法。该方法充分考虑图像像素的灰度信息和空间信息,根据像素的空间位置自适应地计算一个合适的相似度距离来进行聚类分割图像。实验结果表明,与传统的FCM相比,该方法能显著提高分割质量,尤其是能提高对于图像噪声的鲁棒性和分割图像区域边缘的准确性。     

区间模糊谱聚类图像分割方法

近年来谱聚类算法在模式识别和计算机视觉领域被广泛应用,而相似性矩阵的构造是谱聚类算法的关键步骤。针对传统谱聚类算法计算复杂度高难以应用到大规模图像分割处理的问题,提出了区间模糊谱聚类图像分割方法。该方法首先利用灰度直方图和区间模糊理论得到图像灰度间的区间模糊隶属度,然后利用该隶属度构造基于灰度的区间模糊相似性测度,最后利用该相似性测度构造相似性矩阵并通过规范切图谱划分准则对图像进行划分,得到最终的图像分割结果。由于区间模糊理论的引入,提高了传统谱聚类的分割性能,对比实验也表明该方法在分割效果和计算复杂度上都有较大的改善。     

Fast automatic medical image segmentation based on spatial kernel fuzzy c-means on level set method

Fast two-cycle (FTC) model is an efficient and the fastest Level set image segmentation. But, its performance is highly dependent on appropriate manual initialization. This paper proposes a new algorithm by combining a spatially constrained kernel-based fuzzy c-means (SKFCM) algorithm and an FTC model to overcome the mentioned problem. The approach consists of two successive stages. First, the SKFCM makes a rough segmentation to select the initial contour automatically. Then, a fuzzy membership matrix of the region of interest, which is generated by the SKFCM, is used in the next stage to produce an initial contour. Eventually, the FTC scheme segments the image by a curve evolution based on the level set. Moreover, the fuzzy membership degree from the SKFCM is incorporated into the fidelity term of the Chan–Vese model to improve the robustness and accuracy, and it is utilized for the data-dependent speed term of the FTC. A performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm is carried out on the synthetic and real images. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has advantages in accuracy, computational time and robustness against noise in comparison with the KFCM, the SKFCM, the hybrid model of the KFCM and the FTC, and five different level set methods on medical image segmentation.     

Kernel generalized fuzzy c-means clustering with spatial information for image segmentation

The generalized fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm with improved fuzzy partition (GFCM) is a novel modified version of the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm (FCM). GFCM under appropriate parameters can converge more rapidly than FCM. However, it is found that GFCM is sensitive to noise in gray images. In order to overcome GFCM?s sensitivity to noise in the image, a kernel version of GFCM with spatial information is proposed. In this method, first a term about the spatial constraints derived from the image is introduced into the objective function of GFCM, and then the kernel induced distance is adopted to substitute the Euclidean distance in the new objective function. Experimental results show that the proposed method behaves well in segmentation performance and convergence speed for gray images corrupted by noise.     

Video segmentation using a histogram-based fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm

The purpose of video segmentation is to segment video sequence into shots where each shot represents a sequence of frames having the same contents, and then select key frames from each shot for indexing. Existing video segmentation methods can be classified into two groups: the shot change detection (SCD) approach for which thresholds have to be pre-assigned, and the clustering approach for which a prior knowledge of the number of clusters is required. In this paper, we propose a video segmentation method using a histogram-based fuzzy c-means (HBFCM) clustering algorithm. This algorithm is a hybrid of the two approaches aforementioned, and is designed to overcome the drawbacks of both approaches. The HBFCM clustering algorithm is composed of three phases: the feature extraction phase, the clustering phase, and the key-frame selection phase. In the first phase, differences between color histogram are extracted as features. In the second phase, the fuzzy c-means (FCM) is used to group features into three clusters: the shot change (SC) cluster, the suspected shot change (SSC) cluster, and the no shot change (NSC) cluster. In the last phase, shot change frames are identified from the SC and the SSC, and then used to segment video sequences into shots. Finally, key frames are selected from each shot. Simulation results indicate that the HBFCM clustering algorithm is robust and applicable to various types of video sequences.     

An automatic region-based image segmentation algorithm for remote sensing applications

Object-based image analysis has proven its potentials for remote sensing applications, especially when using high-spatial resolution data. One of the first steps of object-based image analysis is to generate homogeneous regions from a pixel-based image, which is typically called the image segmentation process. This paper introduces a new automatic Region-based Image Segmentation Algorithm based on k-means clustering (RISA), specifically designed for remote sensing applications. The algorithm includes five steps: k-means clustering, segment initialization, seed generation, region growing, and region merging. RISA was evaluated using a case study focusing on land-cover classification for two sites: an agricultural area in the Republic of South Africa and a residential area in Fresno, CA. High spatial resolution SPOT 5 and QuickBird satellite imagery were used in the case study. RISA generated highly homogeneous regions based on visual inspection. The land-cover classification using the RISA-derived image segments resulted in higher accuracy than the classifications using the image segments derived from the Definiens software (eCognition) and original image pixels in combination with a minimum-distance classifier. Quantitative segmentation quality assessment using two object metrics showed RISA-derived segments successfully represented the reference objects.     

An adaptive spatial information-theoretic fuzzy clustering algorithm for image segmentation

This paper presents an adaptive spatial information-theoretic fuzzy clustering algorithm to improve the robustness of the conventional fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithms for image segmentation. This is achieved through the incorporation of information-theoretic framework into the FCM-type algorithms. By combining these two concepts and modifying the objective function of the FCM algorithm, we are able to solve the problems of sensitivity to noisy data and the lack of spatial information, and improve the image segmentation results. The experimental results have shown that this robust clustering algorithm is useful for MRI brain image segmentation and it yields better segmentation results when compared to the conventional FCM approach.     

A multi-objective genetic algorithm with fuzzy c-means for automatic data clustering

This article presents a multi-objective genetic algorithm which considers the problem of data clustering. A given dataset is automatically assigned into a number of groups in appropriate fuzzy partitions through the fuzzy c-means method. This work has tried to exploit the advantage of fuzzy properties which provide capability to handle overlapping clusters. However, most fuzzy methods are based on compactness and/or separation measures which use only centroid information. The calculation from centroid information only may not be sufficient to differentiate the geometric structures of clusters. The overlap-separation measure using an aggregation operation of fuzzy membership degrees is better equipped to handle this drawback. For another key consideration, we need a mechanism to identify appropriate fuzzy clusters without prior knowledge on the number of clusters. From this requirement, an optimization with single criterion may not be feasible for different cluster shapes. A multi-objective genetic algorithm is therefore appropriate to search for fuzzy partitions in this situation. Apart from the overlap-separation measure, the well-known fuzzy J_m index is also optimized through genetic operations. The algorithm simultaneously optimizes the two criteria to search for optimal clustering solutions. A string of real-coded values is encoded to represent cluster centers. A number of strings with different lengths varied over a range correspond to variable numbers of clusters. These real-coded values are optimized and the Pareto solutions corresponding to a tradeoff between the two objectives are finally produced. As shown in the experiments, the approach provides promising solutions in well-separated, hyperspherical and overlapping clusters from synthetic and real-life data sets. This is demonstrated by the comparison with existing single-objective and multi-objective clustering techniques.