A multiobjective immune clustering ensemble technique applied to unsupervised SAR image segmentation

Abstract

In the past few years, multiobjective clustering has been one of the most successful techniques in the field of computer vision and data clustering. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised approach for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation, namely, multiobjective immune clustering ensemble technique (MICET). The new technique first divides the image into several regions, and a certain number of pixels are picked out from these regions to form the clustering dataset. Second, artificial immune system (AIS) and multiobjective optimization (MOO) are introduced to generate multiple clustering results, which are then combined together for the following ensemble process. Multiple runs of the multiobjective clustering method with different randomly selected image features are performed to ensure high quality components as well as necessary diversity for an efficient ensemble. Finally, each datum is assigned to one cluster according to the relationship with the clustering dataset. Experimental results show that interesting segmentation performances on SAR images can be achieved by the proposed technique despite its completely unsupervised nature.