Context sensitive fuzzy clustering

We introduce an objective function-based fuzzy clustering technique that incorporates linear combinations of attributes in the distance function. The main application field of our method is image processing where a comparison pixel by pixel is usually not adequate, but the environment of a pixel or groups of pixels characterize important properties of an image or parts of it. In addition, our approach can be seen as generalization of other fuzzy clustering techniques like the axes-parallel version of the Gustafson-Kessel algorithm (D. Gustafson and W. Kessel, 1979)