REGION-BASED FUZZY CLUSTERING IMAGE SEGMENTATION ALGORITHM WITH KULLBACK-LEIBLER DISTANCE

Abstract. To effectively describe the uncertainty of remote sensing image segmentation, a novel region-based algorithm using fuzzy clustering and Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance is proposed. By regular tessellation, the image domain is completely divided into several sub-blocks to overcome the complex noise existed in high-resolution remote sensing images. Taking the blocks as the basic processing units, KL divergence is used to model the distance between blocks and clusters, which enables the model to describe the uncertainty of the non-similarity relationship. Besides, based on the theory of Markov Random Field (MRF), the regionalized KL entropy regularization term is established and added to the objective function to further consider the spatial constraints. Finally, the optimal segmentation results are obtained by estimating the parameters. The experiments carried out on different kinds of remote sensing images by comparing algorithms fully demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.