A Hybrid Rough Set--Particle Swarm Algorithm for Image Pixel Classification

This article presents a framework to hybridize the rough set theory with a famous swarm intelligence algorithm known as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The hybrid rough-PSO technique has been used for grouping the pixels of an image in its intensity space. Medical and remote sensing satellite images become corrupted with noise very often. Fast and efficient segmentation of such noisy images (which is essential for their further interpretation in many cases) has remained a challenging problem for years. In this work, we treat image segmentation as a clustering problem. Each cluster is modeled with a rough set. PSO is employed to tune the threshold and relative importance of upper and lower approximations of the rough sets. Davies-Bouldin clustering validity index is used as the fitness function, which is minimized while arriving at an optimal partitioning.