A local-spectral fuzzy segmentation for MSG multispectral images

In this article, a segmentation approach for cloud detection in Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) multispectral images is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses recursive segmentation that dynamically reduces the number of classes. This algorithm consists of two steps. First, an initial segmentation of the image is obtained using local fuzzy clustering. The clustering algorithm is formulated by modifying the similarity measure of the standard fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm. The new similarity function includes the spectral information as well as the homogeneity and spatial clustering information of each considered pixel. In the second step, a hierarchical region-merging process is used to reduce the number of image clusters. At each iteration, the segmentation algorithm proceeds with a new partition until the final result of the segmentation is obtained. The proposed method has been tested using synthetic and MSG images. It yields a compact and coherent segmentation map, with a satisfactory reproduction of the image contours. Moreover, the different types of clouds are well detected and separated with appropriate accuracy.