A novel fuzzy clustering algorithm with non local adaptive spatial constraint for image segmentation

Generalized fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm with improved fuzzy partitions (GIFP_FCM) is a novel fuzzy clustering algorithm. However when GIFP_FCM is applied to image segmentation, it is sensitive to noise in the image because of ignoring the spatial information contained in the pixels. In order to solve this problem, a novel fuzzy clustering algorithm with non local adaptive spatial constraint (FCA_NLASC) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, a novel non local adaptive spatial constraint term is introduced to modify the objective function of GIFP_FCM. The characteristic of this technique is that the adaptive spatial parameter for each pixel is designed to make the non local spatial information of each pixel playing a different role in guiding the noisy image segmentation. Segmentation experiments on synthetic and real images, especially magnetic resonance (MR) images, are performed to assess the performance of an FCA_NLASC in comparison with GIFP_FCM and fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms with local spatial constraint. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to noise in the image and more effective than the comparative algorithms.