A New Level Set Method for Image Segmentation Integrated with FCM

It is well known that fuzzy clustering and level set are two fundamental methods for image segmentation. The former focuses on the statistical properties of image features, while the latter aims to acquire the good geometrical continuity of segmentation boundaries. Obviously, two kinds of methods may complement each other. Inspired by this idea, a new level set model integrated with fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering FCMLS is presented in this paper, where three new strategies are proposed. FCMLS has some remarkable characteristics and better performance in some sense. Furthermore, it can be proved that the new strategies are also available for integrating many popular fuzzy clustering algorithms into various level set models. The results on theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrate the above conclusions on new model.