A Self-Organizing Feature Map (SOFM) model based on aggregate-ordering of local color vectors according to block similarity measures

Self-Organizing Feature Maps (SOFMs) are extensively used for dimensionality reduction and rendering of inherent data structures. A novel model of a SOFM based on the notion of aggregate/reduced ordering (R-ordering) of vector sets is proposed and applied to the segmentation of color images. The so-called Cross-Order Distance Matrix is defined in order to measure the similarity between local histograms corresponding to ordered sets of color vectors. Color images are regarded as two-dimensional (2-D) vector fields. Basic image processing algorithms are modified since color is represented as a vector instead of a scalar gray level variable. Operators utilizing several distance and similarity measures are adopted in order to quantify the color distribution within a sliding window. The proposed window-based SOFM uses sets of one, two and more color vectors in order to approximate local color distributions within sliding windows. Each set represents a separate node of the SOFM that is trained according to a sequence of ordered input sets of color vectors. A 3 x 3 window is used to capture color components in uniform color space (L*u*v*). The color vectors within the sliding window are R-ordered. The neuron featuring the smallest aggregated distance (similarity) is activated during training. Segmentation results suggest that clustered nodes represent populations of pixels in rather compact segments of the images featuring similar texture. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.