Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm with Histogram Based Initialization for Remotely Sensed Imagery

Abstract

The paper presents histogram-based initialzation of Fuzzy C Means (FCM) clustering algorithm for remote sensing image analysis. The drawback of well known FCM clustering is sensitive to the choice of initial cluster centers. In order to overcome this drawback, the proposed algorithm, first, determines the optimal initial cluster centers by maximizing the histogram-based weight function. By using these initial cluster centers, the given image is segmented using fuzzy clustering. The major contribution of the proposed method is the automatic initialization of the cluster centers and hence, the clustering performance is enhanced. Also, it is empirically free of experimentally set parameters. Experiments are performed on remote sensing images and cluster validity indices Davies-Bouldin, Partition index, Xie-Beni, Partition Coefficient and Partition Entropy are computed and compared with prominent methods such as FCM, K-Means, and automatic histogram based FCM. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed method is competent for remote sensing image segmentation.