Gamma correction FCM algorithm with conditional spatial information for image segmentation

Abstract

Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm is a most usually technique for medical image segmentation. But conventional FCM fails to perform well enough on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data with the noise and intensity inhomogeneity (IIH). In the paper, we propose a Gamma correction conditional FCM algorithm with spatial information (GcsFCM) to solve this problem. Firstly, the pre-processing, Gamma correction, is introduced to enhance the details of images. Secondly, the spatial information is introduced to reduce the effect of noise. Then we introduce the effective neighborhood mechanism into the local space information to improve the robustness for the noise and inhomogeneity. And the mechanism describes the degree of participation in generating local membership values and building clusters. Finally, the adjustment mechanism and the spatial information are combined into the weighted membership function. Experimental results on four image volumes with noise and IIH indicate that the proposed GcsFCM algorithm is more effective and robust to noise and IIH than the FCM, sFCM and csFCM algorithms.