Determination of Number of Clusters in K-Means Clustering and Application in Colour Image Segmentation

The main disadvantage of the k-means algorithm is that the number of clusters, K, must be supplied as a parameter. In this paper we present a simple validity measure based on the intra-cluster and inter-cluster distance measures which allows the number of clusters to be determined automatically. The basic procedure involves producing all the segmented images for 2 clusters up to Kmax clusters, where Kmax represents an upper limit on the number of clusters. Then our validity measure is calculated to determine which is the best clustering by finding the minimum value for our measure. The validity measure is tested for synthetic images for which the number of clusters in known, and is also implemented for natural images.

[1]  G.B. Coleman,et al.  Image segmentation by clustering , 1979, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[2]  David Malah,et al.  A study of edge detection algorithms , 1982, Comput. Graph. Image Process..

[3]  Mohan M. Trivedi,et al.  Low-Level Segmentation of Aerial Images with Fuzzy Clustering , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[4]  Yee-Hong Yang,et al.  Multiresolution Color Image Segmentation , 1994, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[5]  G. W. Milligan,et al.  CLUSTERING VALIDATION: RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED ANALYSES , 1996 .

[6]  King-Sun Fu,et al.  A survey on image segmentation , 1981, Pattern Recognit..

[7]  Sang Uk Lee,et al.  On the color image segmentation algorithm based on the thresholding and the fuzzy c-means techniques , 1990, Pattern Recognit..

[8]  Donald W. Bouldin,et al.  A Cluster Separation Measure , 1979, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[9]  M. Amadasun,et al.  Low-level segmentation of multispectral images via agglomerative clustering of uniform neighbourhoods , 1988, Pattern Recognit..

[10]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  Algorithms for Clustering Data , 1988 .

[11]  James C. Bezdek,et al.  Some new indexes of cluster validity , 1998, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[12]  Bir Bhanu,et al.  Segmentation of natural scenes , 1987, Pattern Recognit..

[13]  T. Kanade,et al.  Color information for region segmentation , 1980 .

[14]  Kannan,et al.  ON IMAGE SEGMENTATION TECHNIQUES , 2022 .

[15]  G. W. Milligan,et al.  An examination of procedures for determining the number of clusters in a data set , 1985 .

[16]  James C. Bezdek,et al.  On cluster validity for the fuzzy c-means model , 1995, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst..

[17]  A. Rosenfeld,et al.  Image segmentation and image models , 1979, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[18]  M. C. Cooper,et al.  The effect of measurement error on determining the number of clusters in clusteranalysis , 1988 .

[19]  P.K Sahoo,et al.  A survey of thresholding techniques , 1988, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[20]  Julius T. Tou,et al.  Pattern Recognition Principles , 1974 .

[21]  Keith Price,et al.  Picture Segmentation Using a Recursive Region Splitting Method , 1998 .

[22]  Rafael C. González,et al.  An Iterative Thresholding Algorithm for Image Segmentation , 1987, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[23]  J. C. Dunn,et al.  A Fuzzy Relative of the ISODATA Process and Its Use in Detecting Compact Well-Separated Clusters , 1973 .

[24]  Sankar K. Pal,et al.  A review on image segmentation techniques , 1993, Pattern Recognit..