COUNTING OF FLOWERS BASED ON K-MEANS CLUSTERING AND WATERSHED SEGMENTATION

. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm combining K-means clustering and watershed algorithms for flower segmentation and counting. We use the K-means clustering algorithm to obtain the main colors in a complex background according to the cluster centers and then take a color space transformation to extract pixel values for the hue, saturation, and value of flower color. Next, we apply the threshold segmentation technique to segment flowers precisely and obtain the binary image of flowers. Based on this, we take the Euclidean distance transformation to obtain the distance map and apply it to find the local maxima of the connected components. Afterward, the proposed algorithm adaptively determines a minimum distance between each peak and apply it to label connected components using the watershed segmentation with eight-connectivity. On a dataset of 30 images, the test results reveal that the proposed method is more efficient and precise for the counting of overlapped flowers ignoring the degree of overlap, number of overlap, and relatively irregular shape.