Segmentation of remotely sensed images with fuzzy thresholding, and quantitative evaluation

Effectiveness of various fuzzy thresholding techniques (based on entropy of fuzzy sets, fuzzy geometrical properties, and fuzzy correlation) is demonstrated on remotely sensed (IRS and SPOT) images. A new quantitative index for image segmentation using the concept of homogeneity within regions is defined. Results are compared with those of probabilistic thresholding, and fuzzy c-means and hard c-means clustering algorithms, both in terms of index value (quantitatively) and structural details (qualitatively). Fuzzy set theoretic algorithms are seen to be superior to their respective non-fuzzy counterparts. Among all the techniques, fuzzy correlation, followed by fuzzy entropy, performed better for extracting the structures. Fuzzy geometry based thresholding algorithms produced a single stable threshold for a wide range of membership variation.