Particle Swarm Optimization and Fuzzy C-means for Domain-independent Noisy Image Segmentation

Image segmentation is considered to be one of the foremost image analysis techniques for high-level real-world applications in computer vision. Its task is to change or simplify the representation of an image in order to make it easier to understand or analyze. Although image segmentation has been studied for many years, evolving technology and transformation of demands make image segmentation a continuing challenge.  Noise as a side effect of imaging devices is an inevitable part of images in many computer vision applications. Therefore, an important topic in image segmentation is noisy image segmentation which requires extra effort to deal with image segmentation in the presence of noise. Generally, different strategies are needed for different noisy images with different levels/types of noise. Therefore, many approaches in the literature are domain-dependent and applicable only to specific images.  A well-recognized approach in noisy image segmentation uses clustering algorithms, among which Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) is one of the most popular. FCM is unsupervised, efficient, and can deal with uncertainty and complexity of information in an image. Dealing with uncertainties is easier with the fuzzy characteristic of FCM, and complexity of information is being taken care of by utilizing different features in FCM, and also combining FCM with other techniques.  Many modifications have been introduced to FCM to deal with noisy image segmentation more effectively. Common approaches include, adding spatial information into the FCM process, addressing the FCM initialization problem, and enhancing features used for segmentation. However, existing FCM-based noisy image segmentation approaches in the literature generally suffer from three drawbacks. First, they are applicable to specific domains and images, and impotent in others. Second, they don’t perform well on severely noisy image segmentation. Third, they are effective on specific type and level of noise, and they don’t explore the effect of noise level variation.  Recently, evolutionary computation techniques due to their global search abilities have been used in hybridization with FCM, mostly to address FCM stagnation in local optima. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is particularly of interest because of its lower computational costs, easy implementation, and fast convergence, but its potential in this area has not been fully investigated.  This thesis develops new domain-independent PSO-based algorithms for an automatic non-supervised FCM-based segmentation of severely noisy images which are capable of extracting the main coherent/homogeneous regions while preserving details and being robust to noise variation. The key approach taken in the thesis is to explore the use of PSO to manipulate and enhance local spatial and spatial-frequency information. This thesis introduces a new PSO feature enhancement approach in wavelet domain for noisy image segmentation. This approach applies adaptive wavelet shrinkage using evaluation based on FCM clustering performance. The results show great accuracy in the case of severe noise because of the enhanced features. Also, due to adaptivity, no parameter-tuning is required according to the type or volume of noise, and the performance is consistent under noise level variation.  This thesis presents a scheme under which a fusion of two different denoising algorithms for more effective segmentation is possible. This fusion retains the advantages of each algorithm while leaving out their drawbacks. The fusion scheme uses the noisy image segmentation system introduced above and anisotropic diffusion, the edge-preserving denoising algorithm. Results show greater accuracy and stability in comparison to the individual algorithms on a variety of noisy images.  This thesis introduces another PSO-based edge-preserving adaptive wavelet shrinkage system using wavelet packets, bilateral filtering, and a detail-respecting shrinkage scheme. The analysis of the results provide a comparison between the two feature enhancement systems. The first system uses wavelets and the second uses wavelet packets as a domain to enhance features for an FCM-based noisy image segmentation. Also, the highest segmentation accuracy among all the algorithms introduced in this thesis on some benchmarks belong to this system.