Multiobjective multiple features fusion: A case study in image segmentation

Most of existing image segmentation algorithms are only based on the color feature. However, the spatial distribution of an image can not be well described by using the color feature alone. Thus, it is necessary to add additional features to design efficient segmentation algorithms. Although many researchers also try to use multiple features for image segmentation, it is extremely difficult to combine multiple features automatically. This paper proposes a multiojective multiple features fusion strategy for image segmentation. The basic idea is to convert the segmentation problem into a multiobjective optimization problem, in which each objective considers one feature. It contains three steps. First, the original image is split into a set of over-segmented regions by using Meanshift to preserve the spatial details and to simplify the segmentation problem. Second, both the color and texture features are extracted to describe the regions. And two similarity matrices are designed by computing the similarity between each pair of regions in two features respectively. Third, a multiobjective evolutionary clustering algorithm is applied to merge these over-segmented regions. In this stage, two objective functions are designed based on the color and texture features respectively. A region index encoding scheme is introduced to design the individual, which contains some cluster representative regions. Some evolutionary operators are proposed to generate the new population. In the final generation, the best solution is selected from nondominated solutions for subsequent segmentation. Experiment results show that the proposed method provides promising segmentation results in combining the color and texture features.