Spatially Coherent Fuzzy Clustering for Accurate and Noise-Robust Image Segmentation

In this letter, we present a new FCM-based method for spatially coherent and noise-robust image segmentation. Our contribution is twofold: 1) the spatial information of local image features is integrated into both the similarity measure and the membership function to compensate for the effect of noise; and 2) an anisotropic neighborhood, based on phase congruency features, is introduced to allow more accurate segmentation without image smoothing. The segmentation results, for both synthetic and real images, demonstrate that our method efficiently preserves the homogeneity of the regions and is more robust to noise than related FCM-based methods.