Unsupervised Texture Image Segmentation Using MRF-EM Framework

Texture image analysis is one of the most important working realms of image processing in medical sciences and industry. Up to present, different approaches have been proposed for segmentation of texture images. In this paper, we offered unsupervised texture image segmentation based on Markov Random Field (MRF) model. First, we used Gabor filter with different parameters’ (frequency, orientation) values. The output image of this step clarified different textures and then used low pass Gaussian filter for smoothing the image. These two filters were used as preprocessing stage of texture images. In this research, we used K-means algorithm for initial segmentation. In this study, we used Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate parameters, too. Finally, the segmentation was done by Iterated Conditional Modes (ICM) algorithm updating the labels and minimizing the energy function. In order to test the segmentation performance, some of the standard images of Brodatz database are used. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.