International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.

4, 2011

Modified Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means Algorithm for Image Segmentation

S.Sivakumar1 and Dr.C.Chandrasekar2
1

Department of Computer Science, Periyar University, Salem, Tamilnadu, India ssivakkumarr@yahoo.com

Department of Computer Science, Periyar University, Salem, Tamilnadu, India ccsekar@gmail.com

Abstract
Image processing is an essential technique for analyzing images. The important part of image processing is image segmentation. Segmentation is a task of grouping pixels based on similarity. In medical image analysis, segmentation is very important phase. In this paper various segmentation algorithms are discussed. This paper presents an image segmentation approach using Haralick feature based Modified Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means. This approach is the combination of standard Fuzzy C-Means algorithm and Possibilistic C-Means algorithm. Experiments are carried out on real images to examine the performance of the proposed modified Fuzzy Possibilistic FCM technique in segmenting the medical images. Standard FCM, Possibilistic C-Means algorithm (PCM), Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means algorithm (FPCM) and Modified FPCM are compared to explore the accuracy of our proposed approach.

Keywords: Fuzzy C-Means Clustering, Possibilistic C-Means, Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means, Modified Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means, and Haralick feature, Image Segmentation. 1. Introduction:
Image segmentation plays an important role in a variety of applications such as robot vision, object recognition, and medical imaging [1]. Image segmentation is a necessary task for image understanding and analysis. A large variety of methods have been proposed in the literature. Image segmentation can be defined as a classification problem where each pixel is assigned to a precise class. Image segmentation is a significant process for successive image analysis tasks. Medical image segmentation is an indispensable step for most successive image analysis tasks. This paper presents an image segmentation approach using Modified Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) and Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means (FPCM) algorithm. Recently, many researchers have brought forward new methods to improve the FCM algorithm [1, 2]. This approach is a generalized version of standard Fuzzy C-Means Clustering (FCM) algorithm. The limitation of the conventional FCM technique is eliminated in modifying the standard technique. The algorithm is formulated by modifying the distance measurement of the standard FCM algorithm to permit the labeling of a pixel to be influenced by other pixels and to restrain the noise effect during segmentation. Possibilistic C-Means (PCM) algorithm, interprets clustering as a Possibilistic partition. Instead of having one term in the objective function, a second term is included, forcing the membership to be as high as possible without a maximum limit constraint of one. Experiments are conducted on Haralick feature extracted lungs images to investigate the performance of the proposed modified FPCM technique in segmenting the medical images. Standard FCM, Modified FCM, Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means and MFPCM algorithm are compared to explore the accuracy of our proposed approach.

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2. Fuzzy C-Means Clustering (FCM):

In hard clustering, data is divided into distinct clusters, where each data element belongs to exactly one cluster. In fuzzy clustering, data elements can belong to more than one cluster, and associated with each element is a set of membership levels. These indicate the strength of the association between that data element and a particular cluster. Fuzzy clustering is a process of assigning these membership levels, and then using them to assign data elements to one or more clusters. One of the most widely used fuzzy clustering algorithms is the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) Algorithm [4]. The FCM algorithm attempts to partition a finite collection of n elements

X =

{x1,...,xn} into a collection of c fuzzy clusters with respect to some given criterion. Given a finite set of data, the algorithm returns a list of c cluster centers C = {c1,...,cc} and a partition matrix
where each element uij tells the degree to which element xi belongs to cluster cj. The standard FCM algorithm minimizing the following objective function,

in class

Where c is the number of clusters, n is the number of data points, is the membership of , m is the fuzziness value and is the set of cluster centers. i, satisfying

The FCM algorithm consists of the following steps: 1. 2. Initialize U=[uij] matrix, U(0) At k-step: calculate the centers vectors C(k)=[cj] with U(k) using (2)

3.

Update U(k) , U(k+1) using (3)

4.

If || U (k+1) - U (k) ||< then STOP; otherwise return to step 2.

3. Possibilistic C-Means Clustering (PCM):

To improve the FCM weaknesses, Krishnapuram and Keller created a possibilistic approach, which uses a possibilistic type of membership function to describe the degree of belonging. It is desirable that the memberships for representative feature points be as high as possible and unrepresentative points have low membership. The objective function, which satisfies the requirements, is formulated as follows [5]:

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International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.4, 2011 Where dij is the distance between jth data and the ith cluster center, ij is the degree of belonging of the jth data to the ith cluster, m is the fuzziness, i is a suitable positive number, c is the number of clusters, and N is the number of data. ij can be obtained using (5):

Where dij is the distance between jth data and the ith cluster center, ij is the degree of belonging of the j data to the ith cluster, m is the fuzziness, i is a suitable positive number, c is the number of clusters, and N is the number of data. The value of i determines the distance at which the membership value of a point in a cluster becomes 0.5. the value of i can be fixed or changed in each iteration by changing the values of ij and dij. The i can be calculated using (6):
th

The PCM is more robust in the presence of noise, in finding valid clusters, and in giving a robust estimate of the centers [8]. Updating the membership values depends on the distance measurements [7].The Euclidean and Mahalanobis distance are two common ones. The Euclidean distance works well when a data set is compact or isolated [6] and Mahalanobis distance takes into account the correlation in the data by using the inverse of the variance-covariance matrix of data.

4. Fuzzy possibilistic C-Means Clustering (FPCM):

FPCM algorithm was proposed by N.R.Pal, K.Pal, and J.C.Bezdek [4] and it includes both possibility and membership values. FPCM model can be seen as below:

Where U is membership matrix, T is possibilistic matrix, and V is the resultant cluster centers, c and n are cluster number and data point number respectively.

The above equations show that membership uik is affected by all c cluster centers, while possibility tik is affected only by the i-th cluster center c . The possibilistic term distributes the tik with respect to all n data points, but not with respect to all c clusters. So, membership can be called relative typicality, it measures the degree to which a point belongs to one cluster relative to other clusters and is used to crisply label a data point. And possibility can be viewed as absolute typicality, it measures the degree to which a point belongs to one cluster relative to all other data points, it can reduce the effect of outliers. Combining both membership and possibility can lead to better clustering result.

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5. Modified Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means Clustering (MFPCM):

The objective function of the proposed MFPCM can be formulated as follows:

Where

The MFPCM yields better results when compare with the existing FPCM, PCM, FCM models.

6. GLCM based Haralick Features:

A gray level co-occurrence matrix, P is used to describe the patterns of neighboring pixels in an image at a given distance, d [9]. In the calculation of the texture features, 4 such matrices are needed to describe different orientations. More specifically, one co-occurrence matrix describes pixels that are adjacent to one another horizontally, P0. There is also a co-occurrence matrix for the vertical direction and diagonally in both directions. These matrices are called P90, P45 and P135 respectively [9]. In figure1, 3X3 neighborhoods of a pixel and in figure 2, different orientations of the GLCM matrix calculated colored as green.

8-neighbourhood

4-neighbourhood

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4-neighbourhood Figure 1: Different Neighborhoods of a pixel in a 3X3 window.

0o Orientation

45o Orientation

90o Orientation

135o Orientation Figure 2: Different orientations for calculating the GLCM feature over the stipulated window. Texture is defined by quantifying the spatial relationship between materials in an image. In the Haralick Texture Method, materials are distinguished based on differences in reflectance values in one spatial domain. Each pixels gray level is compared to the gray-levels of surrounding pixels. This

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International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.4, 2011 method is based on the spatial angle distance between pixels. Haralick defined a Gray Level Cooccurrence Matrix (GLCM) based 14 features, but in our work we calculated 13 only.

7. Experimental Results:
The FCM, PCM, FPCM, and MFPCM methods were applied to Haralick feature extracted lung cancer images. The test images were in the size of 512 X 512 and the Haralick features calculated with 4X4 window size in the angle of 0o. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we demonstrated our image segmentation algorithm by applying it to 3 CT scan images. The original and the FCM, PCM, FPCM and MFPCM applied images of a lung CT scan image with the number of cluster is 4 and the initial centroids are same for all these methods are shown in Figure-3.

Figure 3.1: Original lungs CT scan image

Figure 3.2: FCM applied image with c=4.

Figure 3.3: PCM applied image with c=4.

Figure 3.4: FPCM applied image with c=4.

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Figure 3.5: MFPCM applied image with c=4. The performance of the developed algorithm is compared by evaluating different Image Quality Metrics such as Mean Square Error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). Table 1: Image Quality Metrics
Images Image1 Image2 Image3

PSNR

PSNR

FCM PCM FPCM MFPCM

1.49e+006 1.49e+006 1.49e+006 1.48e+006

6.10 6.09 6.09 6.11

1.44e+006 1.44e+006 1.44e+006 1.44e+006

6.34 6.28 6.34 6.35

1.34e+006 1.34e+006 1.33e+006 1.33e+006

6.98 6.97 6.98 6.99

From Table-1, it can be observed that the MFPCM Method performs much superior to the existing FCM, PCM, and FPCM with respect to the Image Quality Metrics. The segmentation performance will be computed through the Rand index (R), and Global Consistency Error (GCE) and the observations are given in table-2. Table 2: Segmentation Validation Metrics
Images Cluster validity FCM PCM FPCM MFPCM Image1 Image2 Image3

GCE

GCE

GCE

0.45 0.41 0.51 0.52

0.24 0.21 0.20 0.19

0.78 0.76 0.79 0.81

0.35 0.34 0.31 0.29

0.52 0.54 0.52 0.54

0.19 0.18 0.18 0.17

From Table-2, it can be observed that the MFPCM Method performs much better to the existing FCM, PCM, and FPCM with respect to the Rand Index and Global Consistency Error.

8. Conclusions:
The Modified Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means segmentation method yields the better results compare with FCM, PCM and FPCM in the form of image quality and also cluster validity indices. This modified approach is tested on several images. In general, the proposed MFPCM improves the performance of the FPCM algorithm. The improvement can be seen in the experimental results by

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PSNR

Quality Factors MSE

MSE

MSE

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International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.4, 2011 means of Image quality indices and segmentation validity indices. The proposed method also shows that it has better noise immunity in image segmentation.

9. References
[1] W. M. Wells, W. E. LGrimson, R. Kikinis and S. R. Arrdrige, Adaptive segmentation of MRI data, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 15, pp. 429-442, 1996. R. J. Hathaway, and J. C. Bezdek, Generalized fuzzy c-means clustering strategies using Lp norm distance, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, vol. 8, pp. 567-572, 2000. S. C. Chen, D. Q. Zhang, Robust image segmentation using FCM with spatial constraints based on new kernel-induced distance measure, IEEE Transactions Systems Man Cybernet, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 1907-1916, 2004. N.R.Pal, and J.C.Bezdek, A mixed c-means clustering model, In IEEE Int.Conf.Fuzzy Systems, Spain, pp. 11-21, 1997. R. Krishnapuram and J.M. Keller, A Possibilistic Approach to Clustering, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 98-110, 1993. A.K Jain et al., Data clustering: A review. ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 264-323, 1999. K.P. Detroja et al., A Possibilistic Clustering Approach to Novel Fault Detection and Isolation, Journal of Process Control, vol. 16, no. 10, pp. 1055-1073, 2006. Nasraoui and R. Krishnapuram, Crisp Interpretations of Fuzzy and Possibilistic Clustering Algorithms, In Proceedings of the 3 European Congress on Intelligent Techniques and Soft Computing, pp. 1312-1318, 1995. C. Palm, Color texture classification by integrative co-occurrence matrices, Pattern Recognition, vol. 37, pp. 965976, 2004.

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