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A hybrid biogeography-based optimization and fuzzy C-means algorithm for image segmentation

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Abstract

Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering method has been widely used in image segmentation that plays an important role in a variety of applications in image processing and computer vision systems, but the performance of FCM heavily relies on the initial cluster centers which are difficult to determine. To solve the problem, the paper proposes a new hybrid method for image segmentation, which first randomly generates a population of initial clustering solutions and then uses an evolutionary algorithm to search for better clustering solutions; at each iteration, the FCM method is applied on each initial clustering solution to produce its segmentation result. Among a set of popular evolutionary algorithms, we find that the biogeography-based optimization (BBO) metaheuristic exhibits good performance on the considered problem. Besides the basic BBO, we have also proposed a set of improved BBO versions in their combination with FCM for image segmentation. Computational experiments on a set of test images show that the proposed method has significant advantage over the basic FCM algorithm and those hybrid algorithms combining FCM with other evolutionary algorithms such as artificial bee colony and particle swarm optimization.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61325019 and U1509207.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310023, China

    Minxia Zhang, Weixuan Jiang, Xiaohan Zhou & Shengyong Chen

  2. School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Yu Xue

  3. School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand

    Yu Xue

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  1. Minxia Zhang
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  2. Weixuan Jiang
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  3. Xiaohan Zhou
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  4. Yu Xue
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  5. Shengyong Chen
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Correspondence to Minxia Zhang.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Zhang, M., Jiang, W., Zhou, X. et al. A hybrid biogeography-based optimization and fuzzy C-means algorithm for image segmentation. Soft Comput 23, 2033–2046 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2916-9

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