Fuzzy clustering of large satellite images using high performance computing

Fuzzy clustering is one of the most frequently used methods for identifying homogeneous regions in remote sensing images. In the case of large images, the computational costs of fuzzy clustering can be prohibitive unless high performance computing is used. Therefore, efficient parallel implementations are highly desirable. This paper presents results on the efficiency of a parallelization strategy for the Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) algorithm. In addition, the parallelization strategy has been extended in the case of two FCM variants, which incorporates spatial information (Spatial FCM and Gaussian Kernel-based FCM with spatial bias correction). The high-level requirements that guided the formulation of the proposed parallel implementations are: (i) find appropriate partitioning of large images in order to ensure a balanced load of processors; (ii) use as much as possible the collective computations; (iii) reduce the cost of communications between processors. The parallel implementations were tested through several test cases including multispectral images and images having a large number of pixels. The experiments were conducted on both a computational cluster and a BlueGene/P supercomputer with up to 1024 processors. Generally, good scalability was obtained both with respect to the number of clusters and the number of spectral bands.