Artificial immune multi-objective SAR image segmentation with fused complementary features

Artificial immune systems (AIS) are the computational systems inspired by the principles and processes of the vertebrate immune system. AIS-based algorithms typically mimic the human immune system’s characteristics of learning and adaptability to solve some complicated problems. Here, an artificial immune multi-objective optimization framework is formulated and applied to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation. The important innovations of the framework are listed as follows: (1) an efficient and robust immune, multi-objective optimization algorithm is proposed, which has the features of adaptive rank clones and diversity maintenance by K-nearest-neighbor list; (2) besides, two conflicting, fuzzy clustering validity indices are incorporated into this framework and optimized simultaneously and (3) moreover, an effective, fused feature set for texture representation and discrimination is constructed and researched, which utilizes both the Gabor filter’s ability to precisely extract texture features in low- and mid-frequency components and the gray level co-occurrence probability’s (GLCP) ability to measure information in high-frequency. Two experiments with synthetic texture images and SAR images are implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework in comparison with other five clustering algorithms: fuzzy C-means (FCM), single-objective genetic algorithm (SOGA), self-organizing map (SOM), wavelet-domain hidden Markov models (HMTseg), and spectral clustering ensemble (SCE). Experimental results show the proposed framework has obtained the better performance in segmenting SAR images than other five algorithms and behaves insensitive to the speckle noise.