Ant Colony System for Image Segmentation Using Markov Random Field

Clustering is the process of partitioning a given set of pixels into a number of homogenous clusters based on a similarity criterion. The clustering problem is a difficult optimization problem for two main reasons: first the search space of the optimization is too large, second the clustering objective function is typically non convex and thus may exhibit a large number of local minima. In this paper we propose the use of the Ant Colony System (ACS) [1] to solve the clustering problem.