New Spatial FCM Approach with Application to SAR Target Clustering

This paper develops a new fuzzy clustering approach that is suitable for image processing applications. The developed approach is based upon the classical fuzzy c-means (FCM) and referred to as the spatial FCM (SFCM). Its effectiveness is due to two mechanisms. The first is the replacement of the Euclidean distance traditionally used to measure similarity between input images and clusters prototypes by a novel similarity measure that considers spatial relationships between image pixels and thus becomes less sensitive to image perturbations. The second SFCM mechanism for effectiveness is the addition of a similarity penalty term to FCM´s objective function. The aim is to encourage clustering similar images into same clusters. The SFCM is compared to the FCM and some of its variants in the difficult application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target clustering. It is shown that the SFCM consistently yields better performance