Fuzzy-based segmentation of color natural images

This paper presents a segmentation approach for color natural images that performs an edge-preserving smoothing preprocess and a fuzzy-based region growing segmentation. The hue-chroma-intensity (HCI) color space is adopted for its perceptual uniformity. The edge-preserving smoothing preprocess is performed to smooth unnecessary details of an original image and obtain stable HCI information before transformation of color space and image segmentation. The proposed segmentation algorithm is performed in two processes: pixel-label assignment and region merging, which builds up fuzzy-based homogeneity measures for any two neighboring pixels, any pixel with its adjacent regions and any two adjacent regions by making a soft fusion of HCI information. We make some experiments to verify the necessity of the preprocess and the effectiveness of the proposed segmentation algorithm for rough segmentation of color natural images.