Received ( ) Revised ( ) Accepted ( ) ABSTRACT Purpose -Existing shape-based fuzzy clustering algorithms are all designed to explicitly segment regular geometricallyshaped objects in an image, with the consequence that this restricts their capability to separate arbitrarily-shaped objects. Design/Methodology/Approach -With the aim of separating arbitrary shaped objects in an image, this paper presents a new detection and separation of generic shaped objects (FKG) algorithm that analytically integrates arbitrary shape information into a fuzzy clustering framework, by introducing a shape constraint that preserves the original object shape during iterative scaling. Findings-Both qualitative and numerical empirical results analysis corroborate the improved object segmentation performance achieved by the FKG strategy upon different image types and disparately shaped objects. Originality/value-The proposed FKG algorithm can be highly used in the applications where object segmentation is necessary. Like this algorithm can be applied in MPEG-4 for real object segmentation that is already applied in synthetic object segmentation.