Parameter-Free K-Means Clustering Algorithm for Satellite Imagery Application

Unsupervised classification is a popular tool for unlabeled datasets in data mining and exploratory data analysis, such as K-means and Fuzzy C-mean. Although these unsupervised techniques have demonstrated substantial success for satellite imagery, they have some limitations. The initialization number of clusters in K-means clustering application is often needed in advance as an input parameter to the algorithm. Our previous paper regarding the initialization number of clusters in K-means clustering application with a co-occurrence matrix technique has been published. Although our previous approach regarding the number of cluster was discovered, but it was limited to count a number of peaks in occurrence matrix as the number of clusters by manual counting. The best of our previous approach need to automatically find and count a number of peaks in occurrence matrix. In this research, we assume that the satellite imagery is given and we have no knowledge beforehand for segmentation. Hence, this paper presents a simple, parameter-free K-means method for K-means in satellite imagery clustering application to determine the initialization number of clusters with image processing algorithms based on the co-occurrence matrix technique. A maxima technique is proposed for automatic counting a number of peaks in occurrence matrix as the number of clusters. The parameter-free method was tested with hyperspectral imagery and multispectral imagery. The results from the tests confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in K-means method and compared with isodata algorithm.