Research Specifications

The fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is a popular method for data clustering and image segmentation. However, the main problem of this algorithm is that it is very sensitive to the initialization of primary clusters, so it may not perform well in segmenting complex images. Another problem with the FCM is the equal importance of the image features used during the segmentation process, which causes unstable performance on different images. In this paper, we propose an FCM-based color image segmentation approach, termed CGFFCM, applying an automatic cluster weighting scheme to reduce the sensitivity to the initialization, and a group-local feature weighting strategy to better image segmentation. Also, we combine the proposed clustering algorithm with the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to optimize the feature weighting process. In addition, we apply an efficient combination of image features to increase the segmentation quality. The performance of CGFFCM is evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art methods (such as SMKIFC (semi-supervised surrogate-assisted multi-objective kernel intuitionistic fuzzy clustering), and A-PSO-IT2IFCM (alternate particle swarm optimization based adaptive interval type-2 intuitionistic FCM clustering algorithm)) using the Berkeley benchmark dataset. The results obtained by CGFFCM are 95%, 79%, and 91%, in terms of average Accuracy, NMI, and F-score metrics, respectively, which all are better than the competitors. The implementation source code of CGFFCM is made publicly available at https://github.com/Amin-Golzari-Oskouei/CGFFCM.