Map Segmentation by Colour Cube Genetic Clustering
Segmentation of a colour image composed of different kinds of texture regions can be a hard problem, namely to compute for an exact texture fields and a decision of the optimum number of segmentation areas in an image when it contains similar and/or unstationary texture fields. In this work, a method is described for evolving adaptive procedures for these problems. In many real world applications data clustering constitutes a fundamental issue whenever behavioural or feature domains can be mapped into topological domains. We formulate the segmentation problem upon such images as an optimisation problem and adopt evolutionary strategy of Genetic Algorithms for the clustering of small regions in colour feature space. The present approach uses k-Means unsupervised clustering methods into Genetic Algorithms, namely for guiding this last Evolutionary Algorithm in his search for finding the optimal or sub-optimal data partition, task that as we know, requires a non-trivial search because of its intrinsic NP-complete nature. To solve this task, the appropriate genetic coding is also discussed, since this is a key aspect in the implementation. Our purpose is to demonstrate the efficiency of Genetic Algorithms to automatic and unsupervised texture segmentation. Some examples in Colour Maps are presented and overall results discussed.
Image segmentation is a low-level image processing task that aims at partitioning an image into homogeneous regions . How region homogeneity is defined depends on the application. A great number of segmentation methods are available in the literature to segment images according to various criteria such as for example grey level, colour, or texture. This task is hard and as we know very important, since the output of an image segmentation algorithm can be fed as input to higher-level processing tasks, such as model-based object recognition systems. Recently, researchers have investigated the application of genetic algorithms (GA, into the image segmentation problem. Perhaps the most extensive and detailed work on GAs within image segmentation is that of Bhanu and Lee . Many general pattern recognition applications of this particular paradigm can also be found in . One reason (among others) for using this kind of approach is mainly related with the GA ability to deal with large, complex search spaces in situations where only minimum knowledge is available about the objective function. For example, most existing image segmentation algorithms have many parameters that need to be adjusted. The corresponding search space is in many situations, quite large and there are complex interactions among parameters, namely if we are seeking to solve colour image segmentation problems. For instance, this led Bhanu et al. to adopt a GA to determine the parameter set that optimise the output of an existing segmentation algorithm under various conditions of image acquisition. That was the case for the optimisation of the Phoenix segmentation algorithm , by genetic algorithms, implementation described also by Bhanu . Another situation wherein GAs may be useful tools is illustrated by the work of Yoshimura and Oe . In their work, the two authors formulated the segmentation problem upon textured images as an optimisation problem, and adopt GAs for the clustering of small regions in a feature space, using also Kohonen’s self-organising maps (SOM). They divided the original image into many small rectangular regions and extracted texture features from the data in each small region by using the two-dimensional autoregressive model
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