An improved Kernel-based Fuzzy C-means Algorithm with spatial information for brain MR image segmentation

In this paper, we propose an improved Kernel-based Fuzzy C-means Algorithm (iKFCM) with spatial information to reduce the effect of noise for brain MR image segmentation. We use k-nearest neighbour model and a neighbourhood controlling factor by estimating image contextual constraints to optimize the objective function of conventional KFCM method. Conventional KFCM algorithms classify each pixel in image only by its own gray value, but the proposed method classifies by the gray values of its neighbourhood system. For this reason, the proposed iKFCM has a strong robustness for image noise in image segmentation. In experiments, some synthetic grayscale images and simulated brain MR images are used to assess the performance of iKFCM in comparison with other fuzzy clustering methods. The experimental results show that the proposed iKFCM method achieves a better segmentation performance than other fuzzy clustering methods.