FAST K-MEANS COLOR IMAGE CLUSTERING WITH NORMALIZED DISTANCE VALUES

Image segmentation is an intermediate image processing stage in which the pixels of the image are grouped into clusters such that the data resulted from this stage is more meaningful for the next stage. Many clustering methods are used widely to segment the images. For this purpose, most clustering methods use the features of the image pixels. While some clustering method consider the local features of images by taking into account the neighborhood system of the pixels, some consider the global features of images. The algorithm of the K-means clustering method, that is easy to understand and simple to put into practice, performs by considering the global features of the entire image. In this algorithm, the number of cluster is given by users initially as an input value. For the segmentation process, if the distribution of the pixels over a histogram is used, the algorithm runs faster. The values in the histogram must be discrete in a certain range. In this paper, we use the Euclidean distance between the color values of the pixels and the mean color values of the entire image for taking advantage of the every color values of the pixels. To obtain a histogram that consists of discrete values, we normalize the distance value in a specific range and round the values to the nearest integers for discretization. We tested the versions of K-means with the gray- level histogram and the distance value histogram on an urban image dataset getting from ISPRS WG III/4 2D Semantic Labeling dataset. Comparing the two histograms, the distance value histogram proposed in this paper is better than the gray-level histogram.