A Multispectral Image Segmentation Method Using Size-Weighted Fuzzy Clustering and Membership Connectedness

Clustering-based image segmentation is a well-known multispectral image segmentation method. However, as it inherently does not account for the spatial relation among image pixels, it often results in inhomogeneous segmented regions. The recently proposed membership-connectedness (MC)-based segmentation method considers the local and global spatial relations besides the fuzzy clustering stage to improve segmentation accuracy. However, the inherent spatial and intraclass redundancies in multispectral images might decrease the accuracy and efficiency of the method. This letter addresses these two problems and proposes a segmentation method that is based on the MC method, watershed transform, and the proposed size-weighted fuzzy clustering method. The conducted experiments demonstrate the strength of the proposed algorithm in segmenting small objects, which plays an important role in remote-sensing image segmentation applications.