Segmenting Images Using Hybridization of K-Means and Fuzzy C-Means Algorithms

Image segmentation is an essential technique of image processing for analyzing an image by partitioning it into non-overlapped regions each region referring to a set of pixels. Image segmentation approaches can be divided into four categories. They are thresholding, edge detection, region extraction and clustering. Clustering techniques can be used for partitioning datasets into groups according to the homogeneity of data points. The present research work proposes two algorithms involving hybridization of K-Means ( KM ) and Fuzzy C-Means ( FCM ) techniques as an attempt to achieve better clustering results. Along with the proposed hybrid algorithms, the present work also experiments with the standard K-Means and FCM algorithms. All the algorithms are experimented on four images. CPU Time, clustering fitness and sum of squared errors (SSE) are computed for measuring clustering performance of the algorithms. In all the experiments it is observed that the proposed hybrid algorithm KMandFCM is consistently producing better clustering results.