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DOI 10.1007/s11760-011-0274-0
ORIGINAL PAPER
A new method for image segmentation based on Fuzzy C-means
algorithm on pixonal images formed by bilateral ltering
Ehsan Nadernejad Sara Sharifzadeh
Received: 5 November 2010 / Revised: 16 September 2011 / Accepted: 17 October 2011
Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011
Abstract In this paper, a new pixon-based method is pre-
sented for image segmentation. In the proposed algorithm,
bilateral ltering is used as a kernel function to forma pixonal
image. Using this lter reduces the noise and smoothes the
image slightly. By using this pixon-based method, the image
over segmentation could be avoided. Indeed, the bilateral l-
tering, as a preprocessing step, eliminates the unnecessary
details of the image and results in a few numbers of pixons,
faster performance and more robustness against unwanted
environmental noises. Then, the obtained pixonal image is
segmented using the hierarchical clustering method (Fuzzy
C-means algorithm). The experimental results show that the
proposed pixon-based approach has a reduced computational
load and a better accuracy compared to the other existing
pixon-based image segmentation techniques.
Keywords Image segmentation Bilateral ltering
Fuzzy C-mean Pixonal image
1 Introduction
Image segmentation is the process of segmenting an image
into a set of disjoint regions that have similar characteristics
such as intensity, color and texture. It has wide applications
E. Nadernejad (B)
Department of Photonics Engineering,
Technical University of Denmark, rsteds Plads,
Building 343, 2800 Kgs, Lyngby, Denmark
e-mail: sarash@fotonik.dtu.dk
S. Sharifzadeh
Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modeling,
Technical University of Denmark, Richard Petersens Plads,
Building 305, 2800 Kgs, Lyngby, Denmark
e-mail: sarash@imm.dtu.dk
in image processing and is often employed as a preprocessing
stage in various applications, such as mobile object tracking,
medical imaging and face recognition.
A considerable number of segmentation techniques exist
in the literature. These techniques could be classied in sev-
eral categories; threshold-based methods, which determine
threshold values using the image histogram and then clas-
sify the image pixels based on these values [1]; region-based
methods, which group pixels into homogeneous regions and
segment the image into some major areas, such as region
growing [2, 3]; clustering-based methods, which segment the
feature space of image into several clusters and derive a
sketch of the original image, such as K-means [4], Fuzzy
C-means (FCM) [5, 6] and mean-shift [7] algorithms. Mod-
eling images with Markov random elds (MRF) is another
approach which has been recently developed for image seg-
mentation [810]. To achieve their goal, these methods try to
minimize the image energy function using clique concept and
Gibbs distribution. However, the main disadvantage of MRF-
based methods is that the minimization problemof the objec-
tive function is very time consuming in these algorithms.
Recently, the pixon-based approaches for image segmen-
tation have received considerable attention. The pixon con-
cept was introduced by Pina and Puetter in [11, 12] as a set
of disjoint regions with constant shapes and variable sizes.
Their pixon definition scheme is a local convolution between
a kernel function and a pseudo-image. The drawback of this
scheme is that the shape of the pixons cannot change, once
the kernel function is selected. However, both the shape and
size of the pixons could change if the definition scheme intro-
duced in [13] is used. This scheme utilizes the anisotropic dif-
fusion equation to form the pixons. Then, the MRF concept
is considered in segmenting the images. Recently, another
pixon-based image segmentation scheme has been intro-
duced in [14]. In this approach, the pixons combined with
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their attributes and adjacencies construct a graph, which rep-
resents the observed image. This technique uses a fast Quad-
Tree combination (FQTC) algorithm to extract a good pixon
representation. This technique has been integrated into MRF
model and resulted in faster performance in comparison with
the previous approach, as reported in [14].
In [13], anisotropic diffusion equation is used as a kernel
function to form pixonal image. Anisotropic diffusion equa-
tion is an iterative algorithm and has some parameters which
should be initialized. Therefore, this method is time con-
suming for building a pixon map. Also, important regions of
image, such as edges and texture, would be smooth in case of
inaccurate parameter estimation. To solve this problem, bilat-
eral lter [15, 16] is used as a kernel function. The bilateral l-
ter takes a weightedsumof pixels ina local neighborhood; the
weights depend on both the spatial distance and the intensity
distance. In this way, edges are preserved well, while noise is
averaged out. Besides that, the proposed method reduces the
computational time of the algorithmbecause it is not iterative
in contrast with anisotropic diffusion. The advantage of using
pixons is the change in decision level from pixels to pixons
which reduces the computational time, due to the smaller
number of pixons rather than pixels. Finally, the Fuzzy C-
means (FCM) algorithm is applied to image segments.
The results of applying the proposed method on several
standard images show that by incorporating bilateral lter
followed by the pixon concept, the computational time would
be decreased significantly, and the presented method excel
in some criteria, such as variance and pixon-to-pixel ratio,
compared with other existing approaches.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the bilateral
ltering, pixon concept and Fuzzy C-means algorithm are
described in the next section. This is followed by the pro-
posed method in Sect. 3, which includes the Fuzzy C-means
algorithm and the use of pixon concept for image segmen-
tation. The experimental results are presented in Sect. 4. We
conclude the paper in Sect. 5.
2 Background
In this paper, we propose a new image segmentation method
in which bilateral ltering is used as a kernel function to form
the pixonal image. After that, the fuzzy classier is applied
on the pixonal image for the purpose of segmentation.
2.1 Bilateral ltering
Bilateral ltering was rst introduced by Tomasi et al. [16].
It is a nonlinear lter, which is an extension of Gaussian
smoothing. Inthis lteringtechnique, eachpixel coefcient is
weighted according to the intensity level and spatial position
of adjacent pixels. For example, pixels with high intensity
difference from the central pixel are weighted less even with
close proximity to the central pixel. This is effectively a con-
volution with a nonlinear Gaussian lter based on pixel inten-
sities. This lter is applied at a local neighborhood in both
spatial and intensity domain which is also called domain lter
and range lter, respectively [15].
The benet of this lter is that, it preserves the edges
while reducing the noise due to its averaging nature. Mathe-
matically, at pixel location X, the output of bilateral lter is
calculated as follows:

I (x) =
1
c

yN(x)
e
yx
2

2
r
e
|I (y) I (x)|
2

2
d
I (y) (1)
where
r
and
d
are parameters controlling the falloff of
weights in spatial and intensity domains, respectively. Set-
ting
r
to zero reduces the bilateral lter to a simple Gauss-
ian smoothing lter. N(x)is a spatial neighborhood of pixel
I (x),and C is the normalization constant:
C =

yN(x)
e
yx
2

2
r
e
|I (y) I (x)|
2

2
d
(2)
2.2 Pixon model
The pixons are variable-size cells, which locally dene the
resolution of the data. In an image, pixons are adjacent cells
of different shapes and sizes, locally identifying the infor-
mation embedded in an image. The size, shape and position
of all the pixons over an image are collected in a pixon map
that gives a multi-resolution description of the image with
various spatial scales. Since different parts of an image often
do not exhibit a uniform spatial resolution, the use of a pixon
map, as an adaptive scale representation, is justied. It gives
the nest spatial scale for each part of the image [13].
The fuzzypixondefinitionscheme for astronomical image
restoration and reconstruction was proposed by Pina and
Puetter [11, 12]. The pixonal image is constructed by a local
convolution of a pseudo-image and a kernel function. The
kernel function smoothes the pseudo-image at a varying scale
which enhances the details of image in noisy regions. The
scale is a function of pixel position. The formal representa-
tion of the image I at each point x in terms of I
pseudo
and K
is given by
I (x) = (K I
pseudo
)(x) =

K(x, y, (x))I
pseudo
(y),
(3)
where y is the location of neighbor pixels, and (x) is the
width of local pixon. For most applications, radially symmet-
ric kernels over a range of diameters (as dened by (x))
have been used successfully:
K (x, y, (x)) = K
_
x y
(x)
_
(4)
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Fig. 1 a Pixon structure of an image, b analogous graph structure
Then, a pixon map is formed using a hierarchical clustering
strategy which denes pixons boundaries. This map gives a
multi-resolution description of the image [12].
Yang and Jiang [13] presented a novel pixon definition
scheme that can be described as follows:
I =
n
_
i =1
p
i
(5)
where I is the pixonal model of the image; n is the number
of pixons; P
i
is a pixon, made up of a set of connected pixels,
a single pixel or even a sub-pixel. The mean value of pixels
in a pixon is dened as pixon intensity. Both the shape and
the size of each pixon may vary, depending on the observed
image. When the pixonal model of an image has been con-
structed, the image segmentation problemis transferred from
pixel domain to pixon domain. Therefore, P pixons are eval-
uated, instead of (M N) pixels ( p M N). They have
used anisotropic diffusion lter as blurring kernel function
to smooth the image and prepare it to form the pixons.
The result of forming a pixonal image is a graph-like struc-
ture, in which pixons form a set of graph vertices, and the
link between its vertices indicates a common border between
the pixons. Hence, the pixonal image G can be represented
as:
G = (Q, E) , (6)
where Q is the nite set of vertices in the graph, representing
pixons in the image, and E is the set of edges in the graph,
indicating that the two connected pixons are neighbors. In the
example in Fig. 1a, P
1
, . . . , P
10
represent ten pixons form-
ing the pixonal model of an image. The pixonal model can
be expressed by the graph structure illustrated in Fig. 1b.
Figure 2 represents a typical pixonal image.
Since the lattice structure of pixels is transformed to
pixons, the neighborhood structure of the image would be
changed so that a pixon might consist of one pixel or tens
of pixels. As a result, there might be just one neighbor for a
pixon if a pixon is inside another pixon (see P
1
in Fig. 3),
or more than eight neighbors (see P
2
in Fig. 3). This would
reduce the computational load in analyzing an image, and
therefore, the proposed algorithm is applicable for real-time
applications.
Fig. 2 The effect of applying the pixon algorithm to Babon image:
a the original image and b the output image with boundaries between
pixons
Fig. 3 Pixonal image and neighboring structure
Lin and et el [14] introduced a new pixon representation
algorithm based on Fast QuadTree Combination (FQTC) to
extract the pixons. They have dened a feature vector for
each pixon.

p
i
= (n
i
, b
i
,
i
max,
i
min,
i
,
2
i
), (7)
where n
i
is the number of pixels in p
i
, b
i
is the perimeter of
p
i
, and
i
max,
i
min,
i
,
2
i
are the maximum, minimum, mean
and variance of the observed image intensities in p
i
, respec-
tively. In their definition, function f ( p) 0 of pixons is a
pixon error function, and the edge error function is dened as
f
E
_
E
i, j
_
= f
_
P
i
P
j
_
in which P
i
P
j
implies the com-
bination of P
i
and P
j
. To extract a good pixon representation
with a given nonnegative constant, T, the pixons connected
by the edge with the minimal edge error are combined itera-
tively, until the minimal edge error is larger than T.
In this paper, to form the pixons, rst a pseudo-image is
obtained [13] which has at least the same resolution as the
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original image, andthen, fast bilateral lteringis used[15, 16]
for forming the pixons.
2.3 Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm
Fuzzy C-means (FCM) is a method of clustering, which
allows one piece of data to belong to two or more clusters.
This method is frequently used in pattern recognition and
signal processing [5, 6]. It is based on minimization of the
following objective function:
error =
K

k=1
MN

i =1

u
m
i k
d
2
i k

=
K

k=1
MN

i =1
u
m
i k
x
i

k
_
_
_
2
1 m (8)
where m is any real number greater than 1, u
i k
is the degree
of membership of x
i
in the cluster k, x
i
is the i
t h
element of
d-dimensional measured data,
k
is the center of the cluster
with d-dimension (for images d = 2), and |||| is any norm
expressing the similarity between any measured data and the
center
k
.
Fuzzy partitioning is carried out through an iterative opti-
mization of the objective function shown previously, with the
update of membership u
i k
and the cluster centers
k
by
u
i k
=
1

K
i =1
_
d
i k
d
i j
_ 2
m1
(9)

k
=

MN
i =1
u
i k
m x
i

MN
i =1
u
i k
m
(10)
This iteration will stop when max
i k
_

u
(n+1)
i k
u
(n)
i j

_
<
, where is a termination criterion between 0 and 1,
whereas n is the number of iteration. This procedure con-
verges to a local minimum or a saddle point of error.
The algorithm is composed of the following steps [17]:
1. Initialize U = [u
i k
] matri x, U
(0)
2. At n-step: calculate the centers vectors
(n)
= [
k
]
with U
(n)

k
=

MN
i =1
u
i k
m x
i

MN
i =1
u
i k
m
(11)
3. Update U
(n)
, U
(n+1)
u
i k
=
1

K
i =1
_
d
i k
d
i j
_ 2
m1
(12)
4. If
_
_
U
(n+1)
U
(n)
_
_
< then STOP; otherwise return to
step 2.
2.4 Block-based Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm
The FCM algorithm is directly applied on the pixels of an
image. The degree of membership of pixels in each class
should be calculated. Therefore, in each iteration of the algo-
rithm, MN K probability functions should be calculated
(k is the number of classes). If the image be segmented into
b b blocks and statistical characteristics of these blocks be
used to segment the image, it will only be necessary to calcu-
late
M
b

N
b
K probability functions in each iteration round.
Because instead of pixels, those blocks are considered, and
in each block, all the pixels belong to the same class.
In blocked Fuzzy C-means algorithm, instead of the gray
level of each pixel, two characteristics are used to segment
the blocks. These characteristics are the average intensity in
each block and the ratio of standard deviation-to-the aver-
age, called variation coefcient. As a result, the similarity of
pixels in each class would be improved [18].
x
i
=
_
m
i
,

i
m
i
_
(13)
Dening x
i
as a feature vector instead of intensity, each class
center and each pixel distance fromclass centers is calculated
as follows:

m
k
=

MN
i =1
u
m
i k
m
i

MN
i =1
u
m
i k
(14)

k
m
k
=

MN
i =1
u
m
i k
(

i
m
i
)

MN
i =1
u
m
i k
(15)
d
i k
=
_
(m
i

m
k
)
2
+
_

i
m
i

k
m
k
_
2
(16)
As can be distinguished from(15) and (16), in this algorithm,
each class center is a vector.

k
=
_

m
k
,

k
m
k
_
(17)
There are similar stages in FCM(Fuzzy C-means) and BFCM
(Block-based Fuzzy C-means) algorithms, but in BFCM, the
image is rst divided into bb blocks, and then, these blocks
are segmented.
3 The proposed method
In this paper, a novel pixon-based method is proposed for
image segmentation. In Yangs pixon-based algorithm, after
obtaining the pseudo-image, the anisotropic diffusion equa-
tion is used as a kernel function to formthe pixons. In our pro-
posed algorithm, the pseudo-image technique and bilateral
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ltering [15, 16] are successfully used to smooth the image
and prepare it to formpixons. Utilizing the pseudo-image and
the bilateral lter leads to the elimination of some unneces-
sary details and results in a smaller number of pixons, faster
performance and better robustness against unwanted noise.
After extractingpixons, the FuzzyC-means (FCM) algorithm
is used for image segmentation.
The proposed algorithmis an iterative procedure and con-
sists of two stages:
Stage I: Obtaining the pixonal image:
1. Building a pseudo-image with the maximum similarity
to the original image.
The pseudo-image is built from the original image and has
higher resolution. If the dimensionality of the original image
be consideredas D
M
D
N
, thenthe dimensionof the pseudo-
image is l D
M
l D
N
, where l = 2
n
[19].
If n=0, Size (original image) = Size (pseudo-image).
If n >0, Size (original image) < Size (pseudo-image).
The pseudo-image is constructed using (18):
if i = j = even I
2
n (i, j ) = I
2
n1
_
i
2
,
j
2
_
if i = even , j = odd
I
2
n (i, j ) =
1
2
_
I
2
n1
_
i
2
,
j 1
2
_
+ I
2
n1
_
i
2
,
j +1
2
__
if i = odd , j = even
I
2
n (i, j ) =
1
2
_
I
2
n1
_
i 1
2
,
j
2
_
+ I
2
n1
_
i +1
2
,
j
2
__
if i = j = odd
I
2
n (i, j ) =
1
4
_
I
2
n1
_
i 1
2
,
j 1
2
_
+ I
2
n1
_
i 1
2
,
j +1
2
_
+I
2
n1
_
i +1
2
,
j 1
2
_
+ I
2
n1
_
i +1
2
,
j +1
2
__
for i = 0, . . . , 2
n
D
M
1, j = 0, . . . , 2
n
D
N
1,
(18)
This is a sequential operation, so that I
1
resulted from the
input image (n=0), and in the same way, the image I
2
n is
built from previous step image
_
I
2
n1
_
.
Parameter n is of great importance. If n 1, then the res-
olution of the pseudo-image is larger than the original image.
This parameter also determined the smallest size of pixons.
In the image parts, where the intensities of nearing pixels are
similar, which means having little information, the intensity
of newly inserted pixels will be similar to the intensities of
the pixels in the observed image, from which the new pixels
are obtained through interpolation.
2. Convolution of the pseudo-image using a kernel func-
tion.
Inthis step, bilateral lter [16] is appliedonthe pseudo-image
according to (3), and the pixon image is formed.
b
1
b
2
Fig. 4 A blocked image with 3 classes and square blocks
3. In the nal step, pixons are extracted from out of pixels
in the image.
Stage II: Segmentation of the pixon image using Fuzzy
C-means (FCM) algorithm:
Figure 4a represents a segmented image with square
blocks. As shown in the gure, image blocking in bor-
der areas causes incorrect segmentation. Because all pixels
belonging to the b
1
block are segmented into one class, while
this block belongs to two different classes.
Onthe other hand, insome border areas, blocksizes should
be small, but in other areas (for example, sides of the b
2
blocks), great accuracy is not required and larger block sizes
could be considered. Therefore, a Pixonal Fuzzy C-means
algorithm (PFCM) is proposed in this paper to increase the
accuracy of segmentation and also the speed of FCM the
algorithm using the pixon scheme. This is because, instead
of calculating the probability function for
M
b

N
b
blocks,
it is calculated only for ppixons ( p
M
b

N
b
in most of
images).
Considering p

as a pixon in image I and x

i
as the gray
level of each pixel inside p

, then we have
i, j p

: x
i
= x
j
(19)
i, j I : x
i
= x
j
d
i k
= d
j k
, k = 0, 1, . . . , K (20)
Regarding to (9) and (10) in FCM method, the classication
criterion of each pixel is only dependent on its own gray level.
By representing each pixel class as c
i
, we have
i, j I : x
i
= x
j
c
i
= c
j
(21)
and according to equation (19):
i, j p

: c
i
= c
j
(22)
Therefore, in the proposed method, rst image is separated
into its constituent pixons, and then following the stages
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Fig. 5 The experimental results on a synthetic image: a original image,
bnoisyimage, c the segmentedresult of Yangs method, dthe segmented
result of Lins methodande the segmentedresult of the proposedmethod
above, each pixons class is determined instead of classi-
cation of each pixel individually. Thus, each class center is
obtained as follows:

k
=

P
i =1
u
m
i k
x
i

P
i =1
u
m
i k
(23)
where P is the number of image pixons, and x
i
=
_
m
i
,

i
m
i
_
is the feature vector of each pixon.
4 Experimental results
In this section, we would illustrate the efciency of our algo-
rithm by comparing our method with previous pixon-based
and FCMmethods. The proposed method has been applied to
several standard images [20]. First, some experiments have
been set up to evaluate synthetic images qualitatively.
Fig. 6 Segmentation results of the cortex image: a original image,
b Yangs method, c Lins method and d the proposed method
First, a 256 256 size synthetic image with three classes
of different intensities has been created (Fig. 5a). Secondly,
the Gaussian noise with different SNRs (ranging from0 to 10
dB) has beenaddedtothe image (Fig. 5b). Then, the proposed
segmentation method has been applied to these images, and
the results are shown in Fig. 5e. The experimental results
show that the proposed algorithm is robust to noise (Fig. 5e).
In the next step, the proposed algorithm has been applied
to real images and compared with Yangs and Lins methods.
Fig. 6 shows the segmentation results on a cortex image. As
shown in this gure, the homogeneity of regions and dis-
continuity between adjacent regions which are the two main
criteria in image segmentation have been improved by the
proposed method. In addition, several experiments have been
carried out with different images, and results are summarized
in Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. As can be seen from Table 1,
the number of pixons and the ratio of pixons-to-pixels have
decreased significantly with the proposed approach.
Table 2 shows the computational time required for the
three methods (computer specications: Intel(R) Core(TM)
2 Duo CPU 2.40 GHz processor, using MATLAB 7.1). By
using the pixon concept with the bilateral ltering technique
in our approach, the computational cost is sharply reduced.
One of the most important parameters used to evaluate the
performance of image segmentation methods is the variance
within each segment. The smaller value of this parameter
implies more homogeneous region and better segmentation
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Table 1 Comparison of the number of pixons and the ratio of pixons-to-pixels among the three methods
Images The number of pixels The number of pixons The ratio of pixons-to-pixels
Yangs method Lins method Proposed method Yangs method (%) Lins method (%) Proposed method (%)
Babon 262,144 168,351 115,216 74,703 64 43 28
Lena 65,536 30,154 26,489 17,530 46 40 27
pepers 65,536 33,124 32,461 24,906 50 49 38
Cortex 16,384 7,548 6,561 3,624 46 40 22
Table 2 Comparison of the computational time between the different
algorithms
Images Yangs Lins Proposed
method (ms) method (ms) method (ms)
Babon 19,521 21,534 18,696
Lena 11,235 12,658 10,587
Salt and Peppers 8,562 9,561 7,641
Cortex 854 651 567
Table 3 Comparison of the proposed algorithm with Yangs and Lins
methods on Babon image (parameters for the proposed method are:
error =10
14
, K = 3, m = 2.35)
Method Parameter Class1 Class2 Class3
Yangs method M
k
26 175 97
V AR
K
12.56 21.85 19.58
_
(CV)
k
_
%
43 12.48 20
Lins method M
k
24.21 153 95.26
V AR
K
11.92 18.85 17.5
_
(CV)
k
_
%
49 12.3 18.3
Proposed method M
k
31 157 96.1
V AR
K
10.1 17.02 16.5
_
(CV)
k
_
%
32 10.8 17.1
Table 4 Comparison of the proposed algorithm with Yangs and
Linsmethods for Pepper image (parameter for the proposed method
are: error =10
14
, K = 3, m = 2.35)
Method Parameter Class1 Class2 Class3
Yangs method M
k
85 171 132
V AR
K
25 20 22
_
(CV)
k
_
%
29.4 11.7 16.7
Lins method M
k
78 175 126
V AR
K
22 17.43 20
_
(CV)
k
_
%
28 9.7 15.8
Proposed method M
k
76 176 128
V AR
K
19 16.56 18
_
(CV)
k
_
%
25 9.4 14.1
Table 5 Comparison of the proposed algorithm(PFCM) with FCMand
BFCM algorithm for Babon image (error =10
14
, K = 3, m = 2.35)
Method Number of iteration Parameters Class1 Class2 Class3
FCM 32 M
k
93.57 154 20.92
V AR
K
20.15 22.73 18.27
N
k
51,265 36,128 174,751
_
(CV)
k
_
%
21.48% 14.75% 78.37%
BFCM 27 M
k
95.26 153 24.21
V AR
K
19.6 21.85 17.92
N
k
80,983 6,719 174,442
_
(CV)
k
_
%
20.58% 14.28% 74%
PFCM 20 M
k
96.1 157 24
V AR
K
18.96 21.24 17.5
N
k
51,369 37,161 173,614
_
(CV)
k
_
%
19.73% 13.6% 75%
*N
k
is the number of pixels in each class (segment)
Table 6 Comparison of the proposed algorithm(PFCM) with FCMand
BFCM algorithm for Lena image (error =10
14
, K = 3, m = 2.35)
Method Number of iteration Parameters Class1 Class2 Class3
FCM 37 M
k
113.8 43.63 201
V AR
K
48.13 25.47 25.65
N
k
13,687 24,303 27,546
_
(CV)
k
_
%
23.97% 12.68% 12.77%
BFCM 28 M
k
112.9 44.71 200.8
V AR
K
47.3 24.7 25.76
N
k
13,609 24,565 27,362
_
(CV)
k
_
%
23.86% 12.97% 12.69%
PFCM 23 M
k
115.9 46 203.69
V AR
K
48.3 25.42 25
N
k
13,509 24,677 27,350
_
(CV)
k
_
%
23.7% 12.48% 12.52%
results, consequently. The variance and the average intensity
in each class are listed in Tables 3 and 4. As can be inferred
fromthe results, the majority of classes fromdifferent images
show smaller variance using our method in comparison with
the other methods. In addition to the typical variance, we
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Table 7 Comparison of the proposed algorithm(PFCM) with FCMand
BFCM algorithm for Peppers image (error =10
14
, K = 3, m = 2.35)
Method Number of Iteration Parameters Class1 Class2 Class3
FCM 41 M
k
12.85 167.45 81
V AR
K
20.97 19.1 24.98
N
k
30,647 20,088 14,801
_
(CV)
k
_
%
12.52% 11.39% 14.9%
BFCM
32
M
k
124.72 168.36 79.8
V AR
K
19.45 17.77 23.77
N
k
30,472 20,248 14,816
_
(CV)
k
_
%
11.56% 10.56% 14.12%
PFCM 26 M
k
124.38 167.92 79.91
V AR
K
20.07 18.36 24.22
N
k
30,741 20,319 14,476
_
(CV)
k
_
%
11.95% 10.94% 14.42%
Fig. 7 Segmentation results for a color image: a original image, b
Yangs method, c Lins method and d the proposed approach
calculated the coefcient of variation in each class after
applying the three previously mentioned image segmentation
methods. If M
k
and V AR
K
denote, respectively, the mean
value of pixels and the variance in each class, the coefcient
of variation can be determined as below:
[(CV)
k
]
%
(24)
where k denote the class. The results for CV shown in these
tables demonstrate that in our approach, in each cluster, pixel
values are closer together and the areas of images are more
homogenous. Consequently, as can be inferred clearly from
gures, the proposed method shows better performance in
image segmentation compared with other methods.
The proposed algorithm is also applied to color images.
Figure 3 shows that the proposed method shows also better
performance in segmentation of color images (Fig. 7).
Fig. 8 image segmentation using FCM, BFCMand the proposed algo-
rithm (PFCM) for Babon image
Fig. 9 image segmentation using FCM, BFCMand the proposed algo-
rithm (PFCM) for Lena image
In the nal experiment, the proposed method (Pixonal
Fuzzy C-means (PFCM)) has been compared with the clas-
sical Fuzzy C-means (FCM) and the Block-based Fuzzy C-
means (BFCM). Figures 8, 9 and 10 showthe results of these
experiments on different images. Also, variance and coef-
cient of variation in each class are listed in Tables 5, 6 and
7. The table results demonstrate that the proposed approach
outperforms the BFCM and FCM algorithms.
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Fig. 10 image segmentation using FCM, BFCM and the proposed
algorithm (PFCM) for Pepper image
5 Conclusion
In this paper, a new method for image segmentation is pro-
posed. Bilateral ltering has been used to form pixonal
image, and then, Fuzzy C-means algorithm has been used
for image segmentation. Both smoothness and uniformity of
the resulted images have been improved in comparison with
previous methods. Also, incorporating the pixon concept and
bilateral ltering into our method, the computational cost has
been reduced considerably. This is because the complexity
of the FCM algorithm has been reduced due to the use of
fewer numbers of pixons rather than higher number of pixels
or blocks of pixels. In addition, the use of bilateral kernel
function smoothes the pseudo-image at a varying scale that
result in ner detail in regions of high SNR and less detail
in regions of low SNR. Experimental results show that the
proposed method works better than the other pixon-based
methods.
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