Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy C-means Optimized by Ant Lion Optimization

Image segmentation is the indispensable part in the field of computer vision. There are tremendous methods for handling this task such as Otsu-thresholding and Fuzzy C-means (FCM). However, the segmentation results of the images are occasionally unsatisfactory due to the presence of noise. In this paper, two kinds of spatial information consisting of the relative position information and the intensity information of the neighborhood pixels in an image are taken into consideration in constructing the objective function in FCM. Moreover, Ant Lion Optimization, one of the recently proposed optimization algorithms is utilized to optimize the relevant index. Bioinspired ALO has the robust ability to find optimal parameters in search spaces. So the proposed approach to image segmentation based on Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) and Ant Lion Optimization (ALO) may alleviate this problem to a certain degree. A series of experimental validation has been implemented for demonstrating the performance of the proposed approach in the end of the paper.