Color Image Segmentation Using Feedforward Neural Networks with FCM

This paper proposes a hybrid technique for color image segmentation. First an input image is converted to the image of CIE L*a*b* color space. The color features "a" and "b" of CIE L*a*b* are then fed into fuzzy C-means(FCM) clustering which is an unsupervised method. The labels obtained from the clustering method FCM are used as a target of the supervised feed forward neural network. The network is trained by the Levenberg-Marquardt back-propagation algorithm, and evaluates its performance using mean square error and regression analysis. The main issues of clustering methods are determining the number of clusters and cluster validity measures. This paper presents a method namely co-occurrence matrix based algorithm for finding the number of clusters and silhouette index values that are used for cluster validation. The proposed method is tested on various color images obtained from the Berkeley database. The segmentation results from the proposed method are validated and the classification accuracy is evaluated by the parameters sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy.