Robust Evidence C-Means Clustering Combining Spatial Information for Image Segmentation

Abstract

Abstract Although evidence c-means clustering (ECM) based on evidence theory overcomes the limitations of fuzzy theory to some extent and improves the capability of fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) to express and process the uncertainty of information, the ECM does not consider the spatial information of pixels, which makes it to be unable to effectively deal with noise pixels. Applying ECM directly to image segmentation cannot obtain satisfactory results. This paper proposes a robust evidence c-means clustering combining spatial information for image segmentation algorithm. Firstly, an adaptive noise distance is constructed by using the local information of pixels to improve the ability to detect noise points. Secondly, the pixel’s original, local and non-local information are introduced into the objective function through adaptive weights to enhance the robustness to noise. Then, the entropy of pixel membership degree is used to design an adaptive parameter to solve the problem of distance parameter selection in credal c-means clustering (CCM). Finally, the Dempster’s rule of combination was improved by introducing spatial neighborhood information, which is used to assign the pixels belonging to the meta-cluster and the noise cluster into the singleton cluster. Experiments on synthetic images, real images and remote sensing SAR images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only suppress noise effectively, but also retain the details of the image. Both the segmentation visual effect and evaluation indexes indicate its effectiveness in image segmentation.