Mahalanobis distance based on fuzzy clustering algorithm for image segmentation

Conventional Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm uses Euclidean distance to describe the dissimilarity between data and cluster prototypes. Since the Euclidean distance based dissimilarity measure only characterizes the mean information of a cluster, it is sensitive to noise and cluster divergence. In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy clustering algorithm for image segmentation, in which the Mahalanobis distance is utilized to define the dissimilarity measure. We add a new regularization term to the objective function of the proposed algorithm, reflecting the covariance of the cluster. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on a generated 2D dataset and a subset of Berkeley benchmark images.