Noise Robust Multiobjective Evolutionary Clustering Image Segmentation Motivated by the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Information

Abstract

Images are always contaminated by noise, increasing uncertainty. Fuzzy set (FS) theory is a useful tool for dealing with uncertainty in images. When comparing with the FS, an intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) can better describe the blurred characteristic in images due to the membership, nonmembership, and hesitation degrees. However, when applied to an image segmentation, the IFS cannot completely overcome the influence of noise. With the aim of performing noisy image segmentation under several criteria, this paper defines a noise robust IFS (NR-IFS) for an image and then presents a novel noise robust multiobjective evolutionary intuitionistic fuzzy clustering algorithm (NR-MOEIFC). A majority dominated suppressed similarity measure using the neighborhood statistics and the competitive learning is proposed to obtain the NR-IFS representation for the image corrupted by noise. Then, the NR-IFS is fully used to motivate the whole process of multiobjective evolutionary clustering: first, computing a three-parameter intuitionistic fuzzy distance measure; second, constructing intuitionistic fuzzy fitness functions; third, designing a nonuniform intuitionistic fuzzy mutation operator; and forth, defining an intuitionistic fuzzy cluster validity index to select the optimal solution from the final nondominated solution set. The histogram statistics of NR-IFS are adopted in the NR-MOEIFC to greatly reduce the computational complexity. Experimental results on Berkeley and real magnetic resonance images reveal that the NR-MOEIFC behaves well in noise robustness and segmentation performance while requiring a low time cost.