International Conference on Methods and Models in Computer Science, 2009

Medical Image Thresholding Scheme

using Atanassov Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set
Tamalika Chaira
Centre/or Biomedical Engg. Indian Institute ofTechnology, Delhi
Hauz Khas, Delhi, INDIA
e-mail: tchaira@yahoo.com

Abstract-This paper addresses a novel image fuzzy set theory is used by many authors in image
thresholding scheme using Atanassov intuitionistic fuzzy
thresholding that takes into account the ambiguity and
set. The intuitionistic fuzzy set theory takes into account
the membership degree and another uncertainty term, the vagueness. It fmds extensive application in image
non- membership degree. Non membership degree is processing areas to describe vague concepts, which is
calculated from Sugeno type intuitionistic fuzzy generator.
represented in the form of membership function. It
The use of two uncertainties in the Atanassov's
denotes the degree of belongingness of the pixel to that
intuitionistic fuzzy set helps in thresholding the image
more appropriately. The effectiveness of the algorithm is class. The membership values lies in the interval [0, 1]
demonstrated by performing experiment on different types with 0 signifying no membership and 1 signifying full
of poorly illuminated pathological blood vessel images andmembership. This has led to an introduction of large
comparing with other existing fuzzy and intuitionistic
number of algorithms suggested by different authors for
fuzzy thresholding algorithms
Keywords: Intuitionistic fuzzy set, thresholding, gammaoptimum threshold selection. Many of these fuzzy
membership function, Sugeno intuitionistic fuzzy algorithms are based on Shannon entropy [4], measures
generator, hesitation degree. of fuzziness [4, 5, 6], fuzzy cluster based thresholding
[7], fuzzy compactness [8] and so on.
I. INTRODUCTION Again, if we explore deeply about the membership
function in a fuzzy set theory, one can fmd that there is

T hresholding is partitioning the image pixels into another uncertainty or hesitation lies while defming the
two levels as background and foreground. It is membership function. This uncertainty is due the lack of
used in extracting objects from the picture. The problem knowledge or the personal error while defming the
of thresholding is identifying an optimum threshold T membership degree and this has led to an introduction
and segment the image into two regions - object and of higher order fuzzy set theory called intuitionistic
background. It is a preferable method of segmentation fuzzy set (IFS) theory introduced by Atanassov in 1986.
when object and background regions is clearly The non membership degree is not the complement of
distinguishable. In such a case, the histogram is bimodal the membership degree as in the ordinary fuzzy set,
and the threshold lies in the deep valley between the two rather, less than or equal to the complement of the
peaks. Threshold selection may be global or local. membership degree due to the hesitation degree. There
Global thresholding method segments the entire image is very little related work using IFS in literature.
with a single threshold but local threshold method Vlachos and Sergiadis [9] used gamma membership
partitions the image into sub regions and calculates the function to fmd the membership values of the pixels of
threshold for each sub region. Global method is fast and an image and used cross entropy to fmd the optimum
computationally complexity is less. The problem lies in threshold. Couto et al. [10] used a different approach in
thresholding is the selection of optimum threshold such the calculation of hesitation degree and used
that objects are clearly separated from the background. intuitionistic fuzzy entropy to fmd the optimum
Different authors selected threshold such as Kapur's threshold.
entropy [1], Tsai's moment [2], Otsu's class separability But thresholding of real time images such as medical
[3] and so on. images is very difficult. Medical images are poorly
But in this real world, uncertainties are almost illuminated and so it becomes very difficult to extract
inherent in the real time mages and so the selection of the objects from the image. As for example, in human
an optimum threshold becomes quiet difficult. For this,
blood vessel images, there are various types of
uncertainties present in the form of noise, overlapping
of gray levels, vagueness in class defmition;
indistinguishable histograms etc. and so blood vessels
are barely visible. So, intuitionistic fuzzy set theoretic
approach is the best way to deal with these types of
images, which takes into account two uncertainties -
membership and non-membership degree.
In this paper, a novel global thresholding method on
pathological images is introduced using intuitionistic
fuzzy set theory where good results are obtained.
This paper is organized as follows. In section II the
preliminaries on intuitionistic fuzzy set is presented
while Section III tells about the construction of
intuitionistic fuzzy set using Sugeno type intuitionistic
fuzzy generator. Section IV details the proposed
intuitionistic fuzzy thresholding scheme. Section V
displays the results and discussion. Conclusion is drawn
in section VI.
II. PRELIMINARIES
A fuzzy set A in a fmite set X = {Xl'X 2,X3 , ••• ,xn }
be represented mathematically as:
A = {(x, PA (x)lx EX},
where, the function JiA(X): X ~ [0,1] is the membership
degree of an element X in the fmite set X . Thus,
automatically the measure of non-belongingness
is 1- P A (x) .
Atanassov [11] introduced intuitionistic fuzzy set that
takes into account the membership degree, u, and also
the non membership degree, v, of the elements of a set.
An intuitionistic fuzzy set A in a universal set X is
given by :
A = {x, JLA (x), VA (x) I x EX}
where PA(x)~[O,I],vA(x)~[O,I] are the membership
and non-membership degrees of an element x to the set
A with the condition
O~JLA(x)+vA(x)~1
When JLA(x)=I-JLA(x), every x in set A becomes a
fuzzy set.
The hesitation degree, 1iA (x), which arises due to
lack of knowledge while defming the membership
degree, for each element x in A and is given by:
Jl"A(X) = 1- JLA(X)-VA(x)
Obviously 0 ~ Jr A (x) ~ 1.
Due to the hesitation degree, the membership values lie
in the interval
III. CONSTRUCTION OF INTUITIONISTIC Fuzzy SET
In order to construct Attanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy set
(IFS), intuitionistic fuzzy generators are used.
From the defmition of intuitionistic fuzzy generators
by Bustince et al. [12]:
A continuous, decreasing, and increasing function
rp(x) : [0,1] will be called continuous, decreasing, and
increasing intuitionistic fuzzy generator if:
tp(x) ~ (1- x) for all x E [0,1] ·
tp(O) ~ 1 and tp(l) ~ 0 ·
Intuitionistic fuzzy generator or fuzzy complement is
created from Sugeno's generating function [13].
Fuzzy complemental function is given as:
N(p(x)) = g-l(g(I)_ g(p(x)) (2)
where g(.) is an increasing function and
g:[O,I]~[O,I]
Using the function
1
g(p(x)) = ~ 10g(1 + A.p(X))
may
Then, Sugeno's intuitionistic fuzzy generator is
written as:
N(p(x)) = (1- p(x)) / (1+ Ap(X)) , A > 0 (3)
where N(I) = 0, N(O) = 1.
Non-membership values are calculated from Sugeno
type intuitionistic fuzzy generator, N (p( x)). Thus, with
the help of Sugeno type intuitionistic fuzzy generator,
IFS becomes:
AA,IFS = {x,JiA(x),(I- JiA(X)) / (1+ A.JiA(X)) I x EX}
with hesitation degree
7[A(X) =1- PA(X)- (1- PA(X))/ (1 + A.PA(X)) (4)
This Sugeno intuitionistic fuzzy generator is used to
create an intuitionistic fuzzy image.
IV. INTUITIONISTIC Fuzzy THRSHOLDING SCHEME
It consists of two parts- A) Membership function and B)
intuitionistic fuzzy divergence as a criterion function for
threshold selection.
A. Initially the membership function is calculated
from Gamma membership function [5,6]. Gamma
membership function is computed from Gamma
(1) distribution which is given as follows:
The probability density function of the gamma
distribution is given as
 1
B. Optimum threshold is selected using an
- m)]r- exp (x-m)]
x _- ---
( intuitionistic fuzzy divergence measure. Fuzzy
f(x) = f3 f3 , (5)
divergence is proposed by the author [5]. Using
r(y)
the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory, intuitionistic
fuzzy divergence is suggested.
with x ~ m;y,f3 > 0

Consider two intuitionistic fuzzy

where r
is the shape parameter, m is the location
sets A = {(X,PA (x),vA(x))lxeX} and
parameter, f3 is the scale parameter, and r is the
B = {(x, JiB (x),vB(x))lx eX}. If PA(Xi) and VA(Xi) are
Gamma function. the membership and non membership values of a
Now if f3 = 1 , Y = 1 and m"* 0 then the gamma particular element, then due to the hesitation degree
distribution in eq (5) becomes:
Jl'A(Xi) , Jl'A(Xi) = 1- JiA(Xi) - VA(Xi)' membership
value will lie in an interval range
f(x) = exp(-(x-m)) withr(I)=I, tUA(X;),PA(Xi) + Jl'A(X i)} . So the new membership
r(l) value may be written as:
J.lnew A(Xi ) = PA(Xi)+Jl'A(X;) (8)
So I(x) = exp( -(x - m)) (6)
Using the fuzzy divergence concept, the intuitionistic
In the thresholding method, consider an image A of fuzzy divergence between the images A and B is given
size M x M with maximum gray level Land ai) is the as:
(i,j)th pixel of image with i.] = 1,2,3 ...,M . Given a
certain threshold 't' that separates the objects and the I _ Div(A, B) =
background regions, the average gray levels of the
object and background regions respectively are given by
L L (2 - (1- Jinew A(Xij) + Jinew B(Xij))e,unewA(Xij)-,unewB(Xij)_
j i
the relation:
t .count{f)/tj;;count{f)
j;;f
f110 =
(1- u": B(Xij) + u": A(xij))e,unewB(Xij)_,unewA(Xij))
(9)
In this work, the image is compared with an ideally
~ = 'f f .count(f)/ 'f count({)
f=1+1 f=1+1
thresholded image whose membership degrees are 1 and
the hesitation degree is 0 [5, 6]. Ideally segmented
where count (f) denotes the number of occurrences of image is that image whose background/object pixels
the gray level f in the image, L is the maximum gray completely belong to their respective background/object
level ofthe image A. regions. So the membership degrees of the
Replacing m in eq. (6) by moandm 1 the membership background/object pixels with respect to the
function for the object and background regions become: background/object regions are 1, Le., J.lnew B(Xi)) = 1 .
f.!A(aij) = exp( -c.laij - mol)'. if aij::; t for object Substituting J.lnew B(xi)) = 1 in eq. (9), the intuitionistic
= exp(-c.aij -mIl) If aij > t for background fuzzy divergence reduces to:
(7)
I _Div(A,B) =LL(2-(2-~A(Xij))erA(Xij)-1-
where t is the any chosen threshold and aij is the (i,j)th j ;

pixel in the image A.

The constant 'c' is chosen to ensure the membership of
the gray level representable in the range [0, 1] and is (10)
c= 1/ For all threshold gray levels, intuitionistic fuzzy
calculated as /(!max - !min) , where frnin and t.; are divergence is calculated. The threshold level
the minimum and maximum value of gray level in the
corresponding to the minimum divergence is selected as
image respectively.
the optimum threshold.
After the membership function is calculated, non-
membership degree is computed for each pixel using
Sugeno type intuitionistic fuzzy generator using eq. (3) v. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
and then the hesitation degree is calculated from the eq.
Experiment is performed on several medical images.
(4).
The value of A = 2 in eq. 3 is chosen in
experimentation. Three sets on blood vessel images are
shown below. Some of the images are downloaded from
the image gallery
http://www.polconsultant.com/conteduc/hematology/micro/.
Results are compared with Fuzzy method [5],
intuitionistic fuzzy method by Bustince et al. [11].
Fig.1 (a) is a figure of poorly illuminated blood
vessel of size 160 x 160. With intuitionistic fuzzy
method by Bustince in Fig. 1(c), large amount of noise
is present and the blood vessels are hardly segmented.
But the fuzzy method in Fig. 1(b) and the proposed
intuitionistic fuzzy method in Fig. 1(d) are similar and
all the blood vessels are segmented clearly.
Fig. 2(a) is an image of blood vessel of size 200 x
160 where the blood vessels are not visible properly.
With fuzzy method in Fig. 2 (b), noise is present in the
upper part of the image and in Bustince et al.
intuitionistic fuzzy method in Fig. 2(c), there is a lot of
noise present at the upper part of the image. In the
proposed intuitionistic fuzzy method in Fig. 2(d), there
is hardly any noise and all the blood vessels are
thresholded clearly.
Fig. 3 (a) is also a blood vessel image of size 130 x
180, where the blood vessels are hardly visible. With
fuzzy method in Fig. 3(b), the blood vessels are
somewhat segmented with little noise present but in
Bustince's intuitionistic fuzzy method in Fig. 3(c), large
amount of noise present is present especially in the
upper part of the image. The proposed intuitionistic
fuzzy method in Fig. 3(d) almost contains no noise.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper provides a new approach to global image
thresholding using intuitionistic fuzzy set theory on
poorly illuminated pathological blood vessel images.
The algorithm is tested on several medical images and
the thresholded images using the proposed intuitionistic
fuzzy method are better. The reason is that when the
membership function is not accurately defmed due to
the personal error or the hesitation degree, then
intuitionistic fuzzy set method gives better result due to
the incorporation of the hesitation. When the
membership degree selection is adequate, the
intuitionistic fuzzy method is similar than the ones using
fuzzy method.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to acknowledge the Department
of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, New Delhi
for carrying out the research under the scheme "SERC
Fast Track Scheme for Young Scientists".
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Fig, I: a) Bloodvessel image_I, b) Fuzzy method, c)

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method

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Fig. 2: a) Blood vessel image_2, b) Fuzzy method, c)

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