Towards a Hybrid Approach of Self-Organizing Map and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise for Image Segmentation

Abstract

Image segmentation is the process to divide a digital image into a number of regions for further usage. Color images can be segmented by applying density-based clustering methods, e.g. Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), which is used to identify the arbitrary shaped clusters. The drawback of DBSCAN is the high computational complexity whilst the size of image input is normally very large. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a dimensionality reduction method which can be applied to reduce the dimensions of image processing tasks. This paper proposes a hybrid method of SOM and DBSCAN (SOM-DBSCAN) for image segmentation. To evaluating the usability of the proposed SOM-DBSCAN method, four images are used to benchmark image segmentation.