Unsupervised perceptual segmentation of natural color images using fuzzy-based hierarchical algorithm

This paper proposes unsupervised perceptual segmentation of natural color images using a fuzzy-based hierarchical algorithm. L*a*b* color space is used to represent color features and statistical geometrical features are adopted as texture features. A fuzzy-based homogeneity measure makes a fusion of color features and texture features. Proposed hierarchical segmentation method is performed in four stages: simple splitting, local merging, global merging and boundary refinement. Experiments on segmentation of natural color images are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in obtaining perceptual segmentation.