Image segmentation remains one of the major challenges in image analysis.And soft image segmentation has been widely used due to its good effect.Fuzzy clustering algorithms are very popular in soft segmentation.A new soft image segmentation method based on center-free fuzzy clustering is proposed.The center-free fuzzy clustering is the modified version of the classical fuzzy C-means ( FCM ) clustering.Different from traditional fuzzy clustering , the center-free fuzzy clustering does not need to calculate the cluster center , so it can be applied to pairwise relational data.In the proposed method , the mean-shift method is chosen for initial segmentation firstly , then the center-free clustering is used to merge regions and the final segmented images are obtained at last.Experimental results show that the proposed method is better than other image segmentation methods based on traditional clustering.
