Combining contour-based and region-based in image segmentation

Abstract

Background This paper presents an optimized clustering approach applied to image segmentation. Accurate image segmentation impacts many fields like medical, machine vision, object detection. Applications involve tumor detection, face detection and recognition, and video surveillance. Methods The developed approach is based on obtaining an optimum number of clusters and regions of an image. We combined Region-based and contour-based approaches. Initial rough regions are obtained using edge detection. We have used Gabor wavelets for texture classification and spatial resolutions. Color frequencies are also used to determine the number of clusters of the Fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm which gave an optimum number of clusters or regions. Results We have compared our approach with other similar wavelet and clustering techniques. Our algorithm gave better values for segmentation metrics like SNR, PSNR, and MCC. Conclusions Optimizing the number of clusters or regions has a significant effect on the performance of the image segmentation techniques. This will result in better detection and localization of the segmentation-based application.