COLOR IMAGE SEGMENTATION BY CLUSTERING

A new clustering technique is described for segmenting the colour images of natural scenes. The proposed method detects image clusters in some linear decision volumes of the (L*, a*, b*) uniform colour space. The detected clusters are projected onto the line of the Fisher discriminant for 1-D thresholding. This permits the use of all the property values of colour clusters and, in turn, produces better segmentation results than the colour component thresholding schemes. The method is also faster than the existing colour clustering techniques because clusters are specified in linear decision volumes using only 1-D histograms.