X-ray image segmentation using auto adaptive fuzzy index measure

Image segmentation is a crucial step in a wide range of medical image processing systems. It is useful in visualization of the different objects present in the image. For example separation of the soft, boney tissues and background on the lateral skull X-ray plays an important role in producing cephalometric tracing and hence producing accurate cephalometric evaluation used in orthodontic practice. In spite of the several methods available in the literature, image segmentation still a challenging problem in most of the image processing applications. The challenge comes from the fuzziness of image objects and the overlapping of the different regions. In this paper we propose fast auto adaptive image segmentation algorithm for finding the optimal thresholds for segmenting gray scale images. The proposed method is based on minimizing a fuzzy index which decreases as the similarity between pixels increases. The system uses initial estimates of the parameters of the fuzzy subsets derived from the image histogram then uses fuzzy entropy as cost measure to maximize the similarity between pixels of the same subset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.