Color image segmentation using density-based clustering

Color image segmentation is an important but still open problem in image processing. We propose a method for this problem by integrating the spatial connectivity and color features of the pixels. Considering that an image can be regarded as a dataset in which each pixel has a spatial location and a color value, color image segmentation can be obtained by clustering these pixels into different groups of coherent spatial connectivity and color. To discover the spatial connectivity of the pixels, density-based clustering is employed, which is an effective clustering method used in data mining for discovering spatial databases. The color similarity of the pixels is measured in Munsell (HVC) color space whose perceptual uniformity ensures the color change in the segmented regions is smooth in terms of human perception. Experimental results using the proposed method demonstrate encouraging performance.