Unsupervised Feature Selection and Learning for Image Segmentation

In this paper we investigate the integration of feature selection in segmentation through an unsupervised learning approach. We propose a clustering algorithm that efficiently mitigates image under/over-segmentation, by combining generalized Gaussian mixture modeling and feature selection. The algorithm is based on generalized Gaussian mixture modeling which is less prone to region number over-estimation in case of noisy and heavy-tailed image distributions. On the other hand, our feature selection mechanism allows to automatically discard uninformative features, which leads to better discrimination and localization of regions in high-dimensional spaces. Experimental results on a large database of real-world images showed us the effectiveness of the proposed approach.