Metaheuristic Algorithms Applied to Color Image Segmentation on HSV Space

In this research, we propose an unsupervised method for segmentation and edge extraction of color images on the HSV space. This approach is composed of two different phases in which are applied two metaheuristic algorithms, respectively the Firefly (FA) and the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithms. In the first phase, we performed a pixel-based segmentation on each color channel, applying the FA algorithm and the Gaussian Mixture Model. The FA algorithm automatically detects the number of clusters, given by histogram maxima of each single-band image. The detected maxima define the initial means for the parameter estimation of the GMM. Applying the Bayes’ rule, the posterior probabilities of the GMM can be used for assigning pixels to clusters. After processing each color channel, we recombined the segmented components in the final multichannel image. A further reduction in the resultant cluster colors is obtained using the inner product as a similarity index. In the second phase, once we have assigned all pixels to the corresponding classes of the HSV space, we carry out the second step with a region-based segmentation applied to the corresponding grayscale image. For this purpose, the bioinspired Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is performed for edge extraction.