A generic fuzzy rule based technique for image segmentation

Many fuzzy clustering based techniques do not incorporate the spatial relationships of the pixels, while all fuzzy rule based image segmentation techniques tend to be very much application dependent. In most techniques, the structure of the membership functions are predefined and their parameters are either automatically or manually determined. This paper addresses the aforementioned problems by introducing a general fuzzy rule based image segmentation technique, which is application independent and can also incorporate the spatial relationships of the pixels. It also proposes the automatic defining of the structure of the membership functions. A qualitative comparison is made between the segmentation results using this method and the popular fuzzy c-means (FCM) applied to two types of images: light intensity (LI) and an X-ray of the human vocal tract. The results clearly show that this method exhibits significant improvements over FCM for both types of images.