558
5, MAY 2002
Image Segmentation Using Association Rule Features
John A. Rushing, Member, IEEE, Heggere Ranganath, Thomas H. Hinke, and Sara J. Graves
Abstract—A new type of texture feature based on association
rules is described in this paper. Association rules have been used
in applications such as market basket analysis to capture relation-
ships present among items in large data sets. It is shown that asso-
ciation rules can be adapted to capture frequently occurring local
structures in images. The frequency of occurrence of these struc-
tures can be used to characterize texture. Methods for segmenta-
tion of textured images based on association rule features are de-
scribed. Simulation results using images consisting of man made
and natural textures show that association rule features perform
well compared to other widely used texture features. Association
rule features are used to detect cumulus cloud fields in GOES satel-
lite images and are found to achieve higher accuracy than other
statistical texture features for this problem.
Index Terms—Association rules, data mining, segmentation, tex-
ture.
I. INTRODUCTION
T EXTURE is a surface property of an object that is reflected
in a digital image as a local pattern of intensity variation.
When a digital image contains regions of distinctly different
texture, it is possible to segment the image into its component
parts based on texture. Sometimes texture is the only property
that can be used to distinguish a region from its neighbors. The
process of finding region boundaries based on texture properties
is known as texture based image segmentation. In order to per-
form image segmentation efficiently, it is necessary to develop
compact mathematical measures or rules for texture description
or characterization. Features or rules that characterize texture,
the local intensity variations of pixels within a region, are known
as texture features.
A good texture feature must allow one to determine similari-
ties and dissimilarities in intensity variation patterns present in
different regions. It is well known that texture of regions cannot
be characterized by intensity statistics alone [14]. The texture
features must also capture structural information present in the
data. Any mathematical measure or rule that captures statistical
as well as structural characteristics of the texture can be used as
a feature. Many types of texture features already exist. Texture
features based on gray level co-occurrence statistics [10], [11],
gray level run length statistics [4], [8], texton gradients [15],
fractal dimension [2], morphological filters [17], Fourier filters
Manuscript received August 12, 1999; revised October 2, 2001. This work
was supported by NASA Headquarters Grant NAGW 4259. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was
Prof. Robert J. Schalkoff.
The authors are with the Information Technology and Systems Center
and, Computer Science Department, University of Alabama, Huntsville, AL
35899 USA (e-mail: john.a.rushing@intel.com; thinke@mail.arc.nasa.gov;
ranganat@cs.uah.edu; sgraves@cs.uah.edu).
Publisher Item Identifier S 1057-7149(02)01318-0.
1057-7149/01$17.00 © 2002 IEEE
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[1], Gabor filters [6], [7], [13], and random field models [3] are
described in the literature.
Association rules have been used in data mining applications
to capture relationships present among attributes in large data
sets. A new type of statistical texture feature based on associa-
tion rules is described. Association rules are used to capture fre-
quently occurring local intensity variation patterns in images.
The frequencies of occurrence of these local patterns within
a region are used as texture features. Methods are developed
for mining association rules from images and automatically se-
lecting subsets of the mined rules which best distinguish a given
set of textures. The utility of association rule features for super-
vised texture segmentation is illustrated using several test im-
ages. Association rules are used to detect cumulus cloud fields
in GOES satellite images.
II. ASSOCIATION RULES FOR TEXTURE CHARACTERIZATION
A new type of texture feature based on association rules is
proposed to In order to address the problem of texture based
image segmentation. Association rules capture relationships
present among attributes in large data sets. They have tradi-
tionally been used in business applications such as market
basket analysis. Association rules can also capture frequently
occurring local structures in images and thus can be used as
texture features. This section describes some of the issues
involved in using association rules as texture features and
presents methods for resolving them.
A. Association Rule Overview
Association rules capture information about items that
are frequently associated with each other. Assume that
are distinct items and when items
occur together in a transaction, items are
likely to occur in the same transaction. This information is
represented in the form of an association rule as
(1)
where “ ” symbol represents the logical AND operator and the
“ ” symbol represents implication. In the case of market basket
analysis, the items are the things that a customer buys and a
transaction is the set of all items purchased together. The choice
of items and transactions depends on the application.
Each association rule has a support value and a confidence
value associated with it. The support for a rule is defined as
the percentage of transactions for which all the items in both
the antecedent and the consequent of the rule are present. The
antecedent and consequent of the rule are the sets of items ap-
pearing to the left and right of the implication operator, respec-
tively. In (1), the antecedent is the set and
RUSHING et al.: IMAGE SEGMENTATION USING ASSOCIATION RULE FEATURES
the consequent is the set . The sup-
port value of a rule is defined as the number of transactions in
which both antecedent and consequent appear divided by the
total number of transactions. The confidence value for a rule
is defined as the ratio of the number of transactions in which
consequent and antecedent appear together to the number trans-
actions in which antecedent appears. In other words, the confi-
dence is an estimate of the conditional probability of the items
occurring in a transaction given that
the items have occurred in the same transac-
tion.
B. Association Rules for Image Data
For texture analysis applications, the goal is to capture infor-
mation about how pixels in a given neighborhood are related to
one another. In order to use association rules to capture this in-
formation it is necessary to model the image in terms of items
and transactions. An efficient procedure to extract a set of asso-
ciation rules that capture the desired information from images
must also be developed. For the sake of clarity, various terms
used for describing the association rule based approach are de-
fined below:
Root Pixel: The root pixel of an neighborhood is the
pixel at the center of the neighborhood Therefore, there are
root pixels in an image of size . Most algorithms developed for the mining of association rules
Item: Each pixel in the neighborhood of a given root pixel
maps to an item. It is specified by a triple ( , , ) where
is the column offset, is the row offset and is the intensity
of the pixel. The offsets are measured from the root pixel of the
neighborhood. Therefore, the number of distinct items is given
by where is the number of possible gray levels.
Itemset: An itemset is defined as a set of items. The number
of items in the itemset is referred to as the cardinality of the
itemset.
Transaction: A transaction is a set of items associated with a
root pixel. Exactly one transaction is associated with each root
pixel. All items in the neighborhood may be allowed to partici-
pate in the transaction. Alternately, a subset of items identified
explicitly by specifying a set of offsets may be allowed in the
transaction, where is referred to as the cardinality of the trans-
action. The same set of offsets is used at all root pixels. Since
each pixel can assume one of possible gray levels, there exist
distinct transactions.
Association Rule: An association rule that describes local
image structure is of the form (see (2), shown at the bottom of
the page).
The cardinality of an association rule is the number of items
in the antecedent plus the number of items in the consequent.
The support for a rule is defined as the number of root pixels
at which all items in the antecedent appear divided by the total
number of root pixels. The confidence of a rule is defined as
the ratio of the number of root pixels at which all items in the
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559
rule appear to the number of root pixels at which all items in the
antecedent appear. For example, suppose there is a binary image
consisting of a background of zeroes, with many vertical bars of
ones. This could be captured by the association rule
(3)
The rule can be interpreted as saying that whenever there is a
vertical bar of one pixels, the vertical strip of pixels to the right
of that bar are often zero. The support would indicate how often
vertical bars of one pixels occur in the image.
C. Mining Images for Association Rules
The objective of mining a set of images for association rules
is to identify the rules that satisfy user specified constraints. In
order to avoid generating too many rules, users must provide
some constraints. For texture characterization applications, con-
straints include the cardinality of the rules, offsets from the root
pixel, the pixel values and minimum support and confidence
levels. Rules with high support and confidence identified in im-
ages describe frequently occurring local image structures, which
can be used for characterizing texture.
are designed to operate on transaction data that is stored in a
database or in a series of files. These algorithms may be applied
to images if the images are first transformed to a set of transac-
tions as described in Section II-B. Since an image in its original
matrix form is more compact than its representation as a trans-
action set, it is desirable to embed the transformation process
into the mining algorithm rather than generating the transaction
data.
The two-phase association rule mining algorithm of Houtsma
[12] was selected as a basis for the development of an algorithm
suitable for mining images for association rules. The first phase
determines all of the frequent itemsets and the number of times
each of them appears in the image. A frequent itemset is a set of
items that occurs in transactions with frequency greater than or
equal to the user specified minimum support level. The second
phase generates the association rules and their support and con-
fidence values from the frequent itemsets.
1) Computation of Frequent Itemsets: Since the number of
possible itemsets is very large it is not practical to evaluate every
possible combination of items. It is possible to limit the number
of itemsets to be considered by using the minimum support level
specified by the user. It is important to note that an itemset is
frequent only when all its subsets are also frequent [12]. This
observation leads to an efficient iterative approach in which all
frequent itemsets of cardinality are generated using the fre-
quent itemsets of cardinality . The algorithm for identi-
fying frequent itemsets is as follows.
(2)
560
Step 1) All possible itemsets of cardinality one are formed
by combining the candidate pixel offsets with the
legal pixel values. These itemsets form the basis for
all the itemsets generated in the subsequent steps.
Step 2) Support is computed for all the itemsets and all item-
sets that do not meet the minimum support level are
discarded.
Step 3) All frequent itemsets of cardinality are formed
from the frequent itemsets of cardinality . Fre-
quent itemsets and of cardinality are com-
bined to obtain candidate itemset of cardinality
if and only if matches with in all but one item.
The new candidate itemset is the union of and
. Each pair of frequent itemsets of
cardinality is considered.
Steps 2 and 3 are repeated until all itemsets of interest are
generated. The maximum rule cardinality specified by the user
determines the maximum length of itemsets to be generated. The
procedure will also halt if no more candidate itemsets can be
generated due to support criteria.
2) Computation of Association Rules From Frequent Item-
sets: The procedure described in Section II-C1 generates a list
of all itemsets that satisfy the minimum support requirement and
provides the frequency of occurrence for each frequent itemset.
Using this information it is possible to generate a set of asso-
ciation rules of the form . Consider an itemset . Let
and be any two subsets of such that . The
association rule is valid provided the confidence of the
rule, which is the ratio support ( )/support( ), is greater than
or equal to the minimum confidence value specified by the user.
Note that an itemset of cardinality generates 2 candi-
date association rules. If the form of the rule is not restricted
the number of rules generated becomes very large and many of
those rules contain redundant and often irrelevant information
[20]. The number of rules is greatly reduced by constraining the
number of items in the consequent, rule cardinality and the na-
ture of items. For the sake of simplicity, in the texture analysis
applications, the consequent has been constrained to have only
one item. This reduces the number of candidate rules from 2
to for a frequent itemset of cardinality . The association
rule generation algorithm is given below:
Step 1) Rules of cardinality consisting of items
in the antecedent and 1 item in the consequent are
formed from frequent itemsets of cardinality .
For each frequent itemset of cardinality , each
subset of cardinality is used to create
a candidate rule of the form . If
the confidence for this rule, defined as support
( )/support( ), is greater than the minimum confi-
dence specified by the user then the rule is accepted.
Step 2) Step 1 is repeated to generate rules of desired car-
dinalities. The user may specify both the upper and
lower bounds for the rule cardinality.
D. Using Association Rules With Gray Level Images
Capturing local image structures in gray level images using
association rules poses some challenging problems. Two in-
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stances of a texture pattern that appear similar seldom are iden-
tical. Usually, there exist small variations in the structure and in-
tensity values of the corresponding pixels. These variations pro-
duce transactions with different items. In other words, visually
similar texture patterns produce only a few frequent itemsets,
the rest being discarded because they do not satisfy the support
criterion. Therefore the common structure present in images will
not be recognized by the mining algorithm because transactions
of root pixels that belong to a given texture region do not have
many common items.
Texture of a region is determined by the relative positions
and relative intensities of pixels. The local image structures ap-
pearing in different instances of the same texture are not ex-
pected to vary significantly. As a result each of these structures
may be captured by a small number of association rules. The ab-
solute intensity levels depend on illumination and do not provide
any textural information. Since most textures are not perfectly
uniform, there can be minor intensity variations in different in-
stances of the same texture even when the illumination is uni-
form. It is therefore necessary to transform the image so that
the structure is preserved and the small variations in intensity
are ignored.
Similar problems exist in other association rule mining ap-
plications. Some databases contain noncategorical data, or at-
tributes such as age, temperature or pressure that can assume a
range of values. One way to deal with this data is to allow the
specification of ranges of values in the body of the association
rule [16]. Another approach is to quantize the data to a few levels
before mining. The quantization-based approach was chosen for
texture characterization applications for the following reasons:
1) Allowing items to have a range of values adds significant
complexity to the data mining algorithm, while quantiza-
tion requires no changes.
2) Since the texture of a region is defined by the relative in-
tensities of the pixels in the region, there is no need to
pay attention to the actual intensity values. Texture fea-
tures should depend on only the local structure and not
on the actual gray levels.
3) Other researchers have used quantization with statistical
texture features such as gray level co-occurrence matrix
(GLCM) and gray level run length (GLRL) features and
found that it improves classification accuracy [18].
In this context, quantization refers to the process of reducing
the number of gray levels. For example, an input image with
256 gray levels may be quantized to produce an output image
with only four gray levels. There are many algorithms for image
quantization. Most of them are based on local image statistics
or intensity histograms. The two quantization algorithms used
are briefly described below:
Algorithm 1: At each root pixel, the histogram of local
neighborhood of appropriate size (32 32) centered about
the root pixel is computed. Based on the histogram an inten-
sity-mapping rule that would yield approximately the same
number of pixels in each level is determined. This mapping is
then used to determine the value of the root pixel. If an level
image is desired, the pixels in the neighborhood about the root
pixel are sorted into equal groups based on intensity. The
RUSHING et al.: IMAGE SEGMENTATION USING ASSOCIATION RULE FEATURES
group that the root pixel falls in is the value assigned to the
root pixel.
Algorithm 2: At each root pixel , the mean and standard
deviation of intensity values in a local region of appropriate
size centered about the root pixel are computed. The value of
the root pixel is mapped from to as
value of root pixel
where is a positive constant in the range [0.1, 0.5].
E. Association Rule Selection
Selection of features is an important step in any classification
problem. Rule mining algorithms identify all of the rules that
meet the user-defined criteria, including some rules that may
not provide discriminatory information for textures of interest,
or may provide information that is redundant with that of an-
other rule. It is desirable to use only a few rules that are able
to distinguish the texture classes of interest. Feature selection
techniques such as discriminant analysis reduce the dimension-
ality of the feature space by constructing a linear mapping of the
original features [5]. For example, a ten-dimensional measure-
ment vector may be transformed into a four-dimensional pat-
tern vector where each of the pattern vector’s components is a
function of all ten components of the measurement vector. This
means that all of the original attributes must be computed in
order to derive the feature values used by the classifier. Since
the number of rules identified in the first stage may be quite
large (typically in the thousands), such an approach is inappro-
priate for the selection of association rules.
For a multiclass texture segmentation problem, it is necessary
to select a small set of association rules that can be used to dis-
tinguish the texture classes of interest. There are many ways to
select the set of association rules, all of which begin with a set of
candidate rules. The set of candidate rules consists of all rules
that meet the user specified constraints on structure and meet
support and confidence values for at least one of the texture
classes. For a given texture class, the support and confidence
of an association rule may be taken as random variables. Using
texture samples of the desired class the probability density func-
tions for support and confidence can be estimated. The ability
of each rule to distinguish each pair of classes can be estimated
using the class density functions. Based on this information, the
following two rule selection approaches widely used in the area
of pattern recognition may be used.
1) Select one rule for each texture class that best separates
the class from the remaining ( ) classes. This ap-
proach yields rules, one for each class.
2) Select one rule for each pair of texture classes that best
separates the classes from one another. The selected set
of rules would contain rules for an class
problem.
The first method yields a small number of rules, but the clas-
sification accuracy obtained by this method is often unsatis-
factory. The second method, in general, yields better results
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561
than the first method. Since the number of rules selected is a
quadratic function of the number of classes, this method re-
quires significant computation when is large. A new rule
selection method is developed to combine the desirable char-
acteristics of the above two methods. The number of rules in
the set obtained using the new method is usually significantly
less than . However, the set yields classification
accuracy similar to that of the second method. This is accom-
plished by selecting those rules which are able to discriminate
(4)
as many pairs of classes as possible. The approach being incre-
mental begins with an empty set of rules and then adds one rule
at a time. Note that the selected set of rules must be capable of
separating pairs of classes. At each stage, the rule
that can separate the largest number of texture pairs which are
not discriminated by the current set of rules is added to the set
as follows.
1) The set of rules is initialized to an empty set.
2) For each candidate association rule and each pair of tex-
ture classes, it is determined whether the rule can dis-
tinguish the classes. An association rule can distinguish
two classes if either the support or the confidence for the
rule varies significantly between the two classes. For a
given rule, let and be the class density
functions for the support and confidence derived from
sample textures of class . Let the mean and standard de-
viation for be represented by and , re-
spectively. Similarly, let the mean and standard deviation
for be represented by and , respectively.
Two classes and are assumed to be separable by the
association rule if either of the following conditions hold:
(5)
(6)
The term in (5) and (6) above is a threshold that
varies as the selection process runs. The value of should
initially be quite large so that only rules that provide ex-
cellent separation are chosen first. The value of is grad-
ually reduced as necessary. (During simulation is ini-
tialized to 8. In other words the means of the feature
values for the classes of interest are separated by at least
8 ).
3) Association rules are added to the rule set. The rule to be
added is the one that can separate the largest number of
texture class pairs that are not already separated by the
rules in the current set. Rules are added until all class
pairs are covered by the selected rules or no new rules
can be selected. If the rule set covers all class pairs, the
selection process is successful and therefore terminated.
If all pairs are not covered by the rule set then the value of
T is reduced. Steps 2 and 3 are repeated until all texture
class pairs are covered.
Note that the algorithm can select at most
rules. Usually, the number of rules selected is much smaller than
. The rule selection process also ensures that rules
with redundant information are not selected.
562
It may be possible to simplify the association rule approach
by using only the frequent itemsets and not generating associ-
ation rules. This is equivalent to using only the support portion
of the rules. Since the confidence is simply the ratio of the sup-
port for two itemsets, the confidence feature will only be useful
if the ratio provides more distinguishing power than the indi-
vidual support values.
III. USING ASSOCIATION RULES FOR TEXTURE BASED
SEGMENTATION
One important application of texture features is texture based
image segmentation. For supervised segmentation problems,
sample images are available in advance for each texture class
of interest. These samples are used to learn the characteristics
of the texture classes. The goal of supervised texture based
image segmentation is to identify and group contiguous pixels
that belong to the same texture region. One commonly used
method for accomplishing this task is to assign each pixel
in the image to one of the texture classes and then identify
groups of connected pixels with the same class membership.
Thus the segmentation problem can be viewed as a series of
classification problems followed by some post-processing.
A. Supervised Segmentation Procedure
In order to accurately classify textures, the features used for
classification must have significantly different values for the
different classes. Since association rules capture structural as
well as statistical information, features derived from them are
expected to perform well. The support and confidence values
indicate the frequency of occurrence of local image structures
and are found to have significantly different values for different
classes. Therefore, feature vectors consisting of support and
confidence values of association rules can be used for texture
classification as described below:
1) Texture samples from input images are used to identify
a small set of association rules that can distinguish the
texture classes of interest. This is accomplished using the
rule mining and rule selection methods described in Sec-
tion II.
2) Each texture sample of a given class is represented by a
pattern vector. The dimensionality of the pattern vector is
two times the number of association rules selected in step
1. The support and confidence values of each rule become
components of the pattern vector.
3) Using the labeled sample patterns obtained in step
2, a classifier is constructed or trained to distinguish
various texture classes. Any of the proven classification
approaches such as minimum distance classifiers, max-
imum likelihood classifiers, neural networks and decision
trees may be used. Maximum likelihood classifiers are
used in all experiments described in the remainder of this
paper.
4) Support and confidence values for a subimage centered
about each root pixel are computed for each association
rule selected in step 1. The support and confidence values
of all rules together form the pattern vector for the root
pixel. This pattern vector characterizes the texture in the
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region surrounding the root pixel. The pattern vector is
classified using the classifier learned in step 3 and the
class label is assigned to the root pixel.
5) Texture is a property of a region rather than individual
pixels. Since the algorithm classifies each pixel individ-
ually, some of interior pixels of regions are assigned in-
correct labels. The probability of mislabeling pixels near
region boundaries is higher than the probability of misla-
beling other pixels. For this reason, post-processing of the
image is necessary to clean up the boundaries and stray
mislabeled interior pixels. This is accomplished by as-
signing each pixel to the class to which the majority of
its neighbors belong (5 5 neighborhood).
B. Image Segmentation Results
The segmentation procedure outlined in the previous section
is demonstrated using sample images with multiple texture re-
gions. Large digital images containing texture regions are used
to create training samples and test images. The gray level source
images are cropped so that they contain only a single type of tex-
ture and normalized so that they have a mean pixel intensity of
128 and standard deviation of 40. For each type of texture, 32
training samples of size 32 32 are extracted. These samples
are used to select association rule features and train a classifier.
Test images are created using sample texture regions indepen-
dent of those used in the training. Images consisting of regions
of different shapes and sizes are used since the segmentation
accuracy depends on the complexity of boundaries between re-
gions.
For each test image, features based on association rules,
Gabor filters and gray level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM)
are used to segment the image. Association rule features are
based on a minimum support of 0.05, minimum confidence
of 0.6, minimum rule cardinality of 4 and maximum rule
cardinality of 6. These parameters are set empirically, but
sensible values are generally easy to determine. If the support
and confidence thresholds are too high, very few rules (or no
rules) will be generated. If this happens, the support and/or
confidence thresholds should be lowered. Also, the support
threshold must be large enough so that the itemsets can be
detected reliably in a reasonable sample area. Suppose for
example that a 10 10 window is used to compute features.
If a support threshold of 0.05 is used, then one would expect
the frequent itemsets to appear in around 5 of the 100 pixels
in the window. If a support threshold of 0.005 is used, one
would expect that the frequent itemsets to appear in 0 or 1 of
the 100 pixels. If the minimum rule cardinality is set too high,
very few rules (or no rules) will be generated. If it is set too
low then potentially useful rules will be missed. In general, the
parameters should be set as high as possible while still yielding
valid rules in the textures of interest.
GLCM features are based on positional operators at (0,1),
(1,0) and (1,1). Features used include: entropy, uniformity, vari-
ance, maximum probability, element difference moments (2,3)
and inverse element difference moments (2,3). Implementation
is based on [11] and [9].
A Gabor filter is a center surround spatial filter based on a
Gabor function. A Gabor function is an exponential multiplied
RUSHING et al.: IMAGE SEGMENTATION USING ASSOCIATION RULE FEATURES
Fig. 1. Sample segmentation results (a) input images, (b) segmentation using
association rules, (c) segmentation using Gabor filter, and (d) segmentation
using GLCM.
TABLE I
SEGMENTATION ACCURACY (IN PERCENT) FOR IMAGES IN FIG. 1
by a sinusoid. Because of the exponential component, the mag-
nitude of the Gabor function is significant only in a limited re-
gion about the filter center. Gabor filters can be tuned to respond
to bright areas of various size, shape and orientation. In tex-
ture segmentation applications a series of Gabor filters are ap-
plied to the source image and the energies of the filter responses
are used as features. The implementation and feature values are
taken from [7]. Gabor features are based on filters with , single region may contain multiple types of clouds which com-
, and for a total of 24 fil-
ters. Filter sizes of 3, 5, 7, and 9 were evaluated, with size 5
performing best for man made and mixed textures and size 3
performing best for natural textures.
Results of the segmentation are shown for five test images in
Fig. 1. The segmentation accuracy (given as the percentage of
correctly labeled pixels) for each of the five test images is pre-
sented in Table I. The segmentation accuracy achieved using
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563
association rules is comparable to that achieved using Gabor
filters and superior to that achieved using gray level co-occur-
rence features. When association rule and Gabor features are
used, the majority of the segmentation errors occur at or near
region boundaries. When the GLCM features are used several
interior pixels are also mislabeled. This may be explained by
the fact both Gabor filter and association rule based features
achieve nearly perfect classification on the training samples,
while GLCM based feature failed to fully distinguish some of
the textures. For a more detailed comparison of association rule
features to other texture features see [19].
IV. DETECTION OF CUMULUS CLOUD FIELDS IN GOES IMAGES
Texture features have commonly been used in remote sensing
applications such as land classification and detection of atmo-
spheric phenomena. Recently, atmospheric scientists have be-
come interested in the effects of land use changes such as ur-
banization and deforestation on climate. The study of the for-
mation of cloud fields is an important problem in this research
area. The GOES satellites are geosynchronous satellites used for
monitoring and predicting weather. These satellites are ideal for
the study of the formation of clouds because of their relatively
fine spatial resolution, frequent sampling rate and constant pres-
ence. The GOES instrument produces an image every 15 min.
Each image consists of five channels. Each pixel of the visible
channel covers an area of 1 km by 1 km. The spatial resolution
of the remaining four infrared channels is 4 km by 4 km.
Cloud fields often begin as boundary layer cumulus fields
consisting of many small scattered clouds. Cloud detection algo-
rithms based on spectral properties of the data often miss these
clouds. This is due to the fact that such clouds can have a diam-
eter of 1 km or less, which is significantly less than the size of a
single infrared pixel. In order to detect boundary layer cumulus
clouds, the higher resolution visible channel must be used. Iden-
tification of cumulus cloud fields cannot be based on a single
pixel value, since the intensity of the pixels in the field varies
dramatically. Area properties such as texture are therefore ideal
for identifying cumulus cloud fields.
Because of the large volume of data, an automated procedure
for the identification and classification of clouds is necessary.
Current spectral methods are sufficient for distinguishing most
classes of clouds, but they must be augmented with a procedure
capable of detecting cumulus clouds. The required procedure
must label each pixel in the GOES image as belonging to one of
three classes: background, cumulus cloud field, or other cloud
field. The problem is complicated by the fact that the boundaries
between cloud fields are irregular and the fields themselves are
often small. In addition, cloud fields sometimes overlap, so a
pletely or partially obscure one another.
The image segmentation algorithm based on association rules
is used to detect cloud fields in GOES images. In order to re-
move the effects of the light reflected from the earth’s surface, a
visible reference background image is constructed for each time
of the day (15 min interval). The intensity of each pixel of the
reference image is taken as the minimum of pixel values for the
previous seven days. The intensities of the reference image are
564 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 11, NO. 5, MAY 2002

Fig. 2. GOES Scene 1. (a) Visible image, (b) segmentation achieved using Fig. 4. GOES Scene 3. (a) Visible image, (b) segmentation achieved using
association rule features, (c) labels assigned by expert 1, and (d) labels assigned association rule features, (c) labels assigned by expert 1, and (d) labels assigned
by expert 2. by expert 2.

Fig. 3. GOES Scene 2. (a) Visible image, (b) segmentation achieved using Fig. 5. GOES Scene 4. (a) Visible image, (b) segmentation achieved using
association rule features, (c) labels assigned by expert 1, and (d) labels assigned association rule features, (c) labels assigned by expert 1, and (d) labels assigned
by expert 2. by expert 2.

attributed to the light reflected by the ground in the absence of A training phase is required for the selection of texture fea-
cloud cover. The reference image is subtracted from the visible tures and for training the classifiers. A total of one hundred
image before it is segmented. sample images of size 13 13 are extracted. Fifty images are

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RUSHING et al.: IMAGE SEGMENTATION USING ASSOCIATION RULE FEATURES 565

Fig. 6. GOES Scene 5. (a) Visible image, (b) segmentation achieved using Fig. 7. GOES Scene 6. (a) Visible image, (b) segmentation achieved using
association rule features, (c) labels assigned by expert 1, and (d) labels assigned association rule features, (c) labels assigned by expert 1, and (d) labels assigned
by expert 2. by expert 2.

used for training the classifier and the remaining images are
used for testing. Of the 50 training samples, ten represent the
background class, 20 represent the cumulus cloud class and 20
represent the other cloud class. The test samples are chosen in
the same way. The training and test samples are drawn from
different images. The training samples are used to select tex-
ture features and train classifiers as described in Section III. The
test samples are used to verify the performance of the classi-
fiers learned during training. Features based on Gabor filters,
GLRL, GLCM, and association rules are used. The association
rule, Gabor filter and GLRL based features all achieve a clas-
sification accuracy of 98% on the test images (49 of 50 right),
while GLCM based features achieve a classification accuracy of
92% (46 of 50 right).
Segmentation accuracy is measured using images labeled or
segmented by atmospheric science experts. Six scenes of size
512 512 pixels are labeled by two independent experts. Due
to the difficulties described previously, some pixels are labeled
differently by different experts. Only those pixels that receive
consistent labeling are considered in the accuracy computation.
These scenes are segmented using association rule, Gabor
filter, GLCM and GLRL based features. Association rule
features yield an average accuracy of 89.11% on the six scenes,
compared to 72.98% for GLCM features, 88.26% for GLRL Fig. 8. GOES Scene 1. (a) Segmentation with association rule features, (b)
features and 86.35% for Gabor features. As expected, the segmentation with Gabor features, (c) segmentation with GLCM features, and
(d) segmentation with GLRL features.
segmentation accuracy is significantly lower than the classifi-
cation accuracy in all cases. (The classifications are performed
using image patches consisting of only one texture, while the errors are made at the boundaries between textures.) Figs. 2–7
segmentation is performed using the whole image. Since there illustrate the results achieved using association rule features on
are many pixels on or near texture boundaries and since texture all six scenes. Fig. 8 shows the segmentation achieved using all
computations consider a region rather than a single pixel, many four features for one scene.

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566
Run times were measured for each of the features on a system
with an 850 MHz Pentium III processor. For each feature, two
times are of interest: the time required to select features and train
the classifier and the time required to segment each image. Since
the classifier is trained once and then reused on many images,
the training time is not nearly as important as the image segmen-
tation time. It took 7 min and 33 s to identify, evaluate and se-
lect the association rules. It took only a few seconds to train and
evaluate each of the classifiers due largely to the small size of
the samples. Average segmentation times for 512 512 images
are as follows: 83.25 s for Gabor filter features, 86.46 s for as-
sociation rule features, 113.82 s for GLCM features and 129.92
s for GLRL features. Note that these times depend heavily on
the number of features used in each case.
V. CONCLUSIONS
A new texture feature based on association rules is devel-
oped and thoroughly evaluated. Association rules are shown to
be capable of capturing frequently occurring local image struc-
tures, which are vital for texture characterization and classifi-
cation. Association rule features perform well for supervised
segmentation problems. Simulation results using images with
texture regions of various shapes and sizes indicate that associ-
ation rule features achieve segmentation accuracy comparable
to that achieved using Gabor filter based features and superior
to that achieved using GLCM features. The utility of associ-
ation rules as texture features is demonstrated using a remote
sensing application. Association rule features are used to detect
cumulus clouds in GOES satellite images. The segmentation ac-
curacy achieved using association rule features is higher than
that achieved using Gabor filter, GLCM and GLRL based fea-
tures for this application.
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John A. Rushing (M’98) received the B.S. degree in
computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, in 1988 and the M.S.
and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Uni-
versity of Alabama, Huntsville, in 1995 and 1999, re-
spectively.
He was a Research Scientist with the Information
Technology and Systems Center, University of
Alabama. He is currently a Senior CAD Engineer
with the Intel Corporation. His research interests
include pattern recognition, image processing, and
data mining.
Heggere Ranganath was born in Tumkur, India, in
1951. He received the B.S. degree from Bangalore
University, India, in 1972, the M.S. degree from the
University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, in 1978, and
the Ph.D. degree from Auburn University, Auburn,
AL, in 1980, all in electrical engineering.
He is currently an Associate Professor of computer
science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. His
areas of research include pattern recognition, image
processing, and artificial neural networks. Since
1982, as a Principal Investigator or Investigator, he
has received ten research grants from defense and space organizations. He has
graduated five Ph.D. students and published more than 50 technical papers
in his fields. He is known for the development of self partitioning neural
networks and the contributions he has made to the area of pulse coupled neural
networks. Both of these networks are being used in many practical image
processing/analysis systems.
Thomas H. Hinke received the B.S. degree in elec-
trical engineering from the University of California
at Berkeley in 1967, the M.S. degree in business ad-
ministration from Oklahoma City University in 1971,
the M.S. degree in computer science from University
of California, Los Angeles in 1975, and the Ph.D.
degree in computer science from the University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1991.
He was Associate Professor of computer science
at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. He is cur-
rently a Senior Scientist at the NASA Ames Research
Center, developing a data mining system to operate on NASA’s Information
Power grid. In 1999, he was one of the co-organizers of the NASA Workshop
on Issues in the Application of Data Mining to Scientific Data. His primary re-
search interests center around knowledge extraction from data. This includes
the development of high-performance data mining systems, as well as previous
work in developing security-oriented inference-detection systems for databases.
RUSHING et al.: IMAGE SEGMENTATION USING ASSOCIATION RULE FEATURES 567

Sara J. Graves received the B.S. degree in mathe-

matics and the M.A. degree in institutional analysis
from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in 1967
and 1971, respectively, and the M.S. and Ph.D. de-
grees in computer science from the University of Al-
abama, Huntsville, in 1981 and 1984, respectively.
She is currently the Director of the Information
Technology and Systems Center and Professor of
Computer Science at the University of Alabama,
Huntsville. She is the Principle Investigator of
several NASA projects involving data mining and
an organizer of the NASA Workshop on the Applications of Data Mining
to Scientific Data. She performs research and development in large-scale
distributed information systems, data mining and knowledge environments,
and high-performance networking. She has been a reviewer for the IEEE, NSF,
NASA, and NOAA and chairs the NASA Headquarters Earth Science Data and
Information Systems and Services Advisory Committee.

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