Segmenting hotspots from medical thermal images using Density-based modified FC-Pc FS with spatial information

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ABSTRACT Thermal cameras complemented with robust and automated computational intelligence-aided diagnostic systems can be deployed at public gathering points and on smartphones to raise alarms about thriving diseases of their body due to inflammation in a timely manner, thereby strengthening human health systems. In this work, we have proposed two robust Density-based modified Picture Fuzzy Clustering methods with spatial information to segment hotspots from human’s abnormal thermal images. We formulated and solved the objective function by combining P c FS-based clustering method with modified Renyi’s Entropy. We demonstrated the robustness of our methods, DSIFC-Pc FS and DSIMFC-Pc FS, on three publicly available datasets and an artificially created noisy dataset of thermal images. We have obtained a ZC score of 0.933, 0.947 and 0.933 for DB-DMR-IR, DB-FOOT-IR and DB-THY-IR datasets, respectively. Also, our method converged to an optimal partition matrix in minimum iterations. The experimental performance shows that the proposed approaches, DSIFC- P c FS and DSIMFC- P c FS, outperformed other ten related approaches in segmenting the medical thermal images with and without noise, indicating their robustness and efficacy, in terms of various unsupervised evaluation metrics. Also, we statistically analysed their performance in contrast to other methods using the Friedman Test, which advocate their superiority.