A novel fuzzy system for edge detection in noisy image using bacterial foraging

Bio-inspired edge detection using fuzzy logic has achieved great attention in the recent years. The bacterial foraging (BF) algorithm, introduced in Passino (IEEE Control Syst Mag 22(3):52–67, 2002) is one of the powerful bio-inspired optimization algorithms. It attempts to imitate a single bacterium or groups of E. Coli bacteria. In BF algorithm, a set of bacteria forages towards a nutrient rich medium to get more nutrients. A new edge detection technique is proposed to deal with the noisy image using fuzzy derivative and bacterial foraging algorithm. The bacteria detect edge pixels as well as noisy pixels in its path during the foraging. The new fuzzy inference rules are devised and the direction of movement of each bacterium is found using these rules. During the foraging if a bacterium encounters a noisy pixel, it first removes the noisy pixel using an adaptive fuzzy switching median filter in Toh and Isa (IEEE Signal Process Lett 17(3):281–284, 2010). If the bacterium does not encounter any noisy pixel then it searches only the edge pixel in the image and draws the edge map. This approach can detect the edges in an image in the presence of impulse noise up to 30%.