Performance evaluation of spatial fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm on GPU for image segmentation

Image processing by segmentation technique is an important phase in medical imaging such as MRI. Its objective is to analyze the different tissues in human body. In research area, Fuzzy set is one of the most successful techniques that guarantees a robust classification. Spatial FCM (SFCM); one of the fuzzy c-means variants; considers spatial information to deal with the noisy images. To reduce this iterative algorithm’s execution time, a hard SIMD architecture has been planted named the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). In this work, a great contribution has been done to diagnose, confront and implement three different parallel implementations on GPU. A parallel implementations’ extensive study of SFCM entitled PSFCM using 3 × 3 window is presented, and the experiments illustrate a significant decrease in terms of running time of this algorithm known by its high complexity. The experimental results indicate that the parallel version’s execution time is about 9.46 times faster than the sequential implementation on image segmentation. This gain in terms of speed-up is achieved on the Nvidia GeForce GT 740 m GPU.