Soft computing approaches for image segmentation: a survey

Image segmentation is the method of partitioning an image into a group of pixels that are homogenous in some manner. The homogeneity dependents on some attributes like intensity, color etc. Segmentation being a pre-processing step in image processing have been used in the number of applications like identification of objects to medical images, satellite images and much more. The taxonomy of an image segmentation methods collectively can be divided among two categories Traditional methods and Soft Computing (SC) methods. Unlike Traditional methods, SC methods have the ability to simulate human thinking and are flexible to work with their ownership function, have been predominantly applied to the task of image segmentation. SC techniques are tolerant of partial truth, imprecision, uncertainty, and approximations. Soft Computing approaches also having advantages of providing cost-effective, high performance and steadfast solutions. In this survey paper, our emphasis is on core SC approaches like Fuzzy logic, Artificial Neural Network, and Genetic Algorithm used for image segmentation. The contribution lies in the fact to present this paper to the researchers that explore state-of-the-art elaboration of almost all dimensions associated with the image segmentation. The idea is to encapsulate various aspects like emerging topics, methods, evaluation parameters, the problem associated with different type of images, databases, segmentation applications, and other resources so that, it could be advantageous for researchers to make effort in developing new methods for segmentation. The paper accomplishes with findings and concluding remarks.