A Fuzzy Clustering Approach for Complex Color Image Segmentation Based on Gaussian Model with Interactions between Color Planes and Mixture Gaussian Model

In complex color images, colors inside a homogeneous region might be contradistinctive and the distribution could not be described by a simple Gaussian distribution as used in traditional image segmentation algorithms. Based on the characteristics that the red, green, and blue color planes are not independent and pixels in the same neighborhood system might stand for the same object, we introduce a Gaussian model containing the interactions between different color planes to strengthen the connections both on a color plane and between color planes in a neighborhood system. Consequently, a Gaussian mixture model with the prior distribution, defined by Markov random field and acting as the weight, is employed to describe the distribution of color measures inside a homogeneous region. With the Gaussian mixture model containing the interactions between color planes, we proposed a fuzzy clustering approach for complex color image segmentation. Experiments on synthetic and real-color images, in which homogeneous regions are complex, show that the proposed algorithm compares favorably with the compared algorithms developed for the same purpose.