Unsupervised color image segmentation using mean shift and deterministic annealing EM

Abstract

We present an unsupervised segmentation algorithm combining the mean shift procedure and deterministic annealing expectation maximization (DAEM) called MS-DAEM algorithm. We use the mean shift procedure to determine the number of components in a mixture model and to detect their modes of each mixture component. Next, we have adopted the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to represent the probability distribution of color feature vectors. A DAEM formula is used to estimate the parameters of the GMM which represents the multi-colored objects statistically. The experimental results show that the mean shift part of the proposed MS-DAEM algorithm is efficient to determine the number of components and initial modes of each component in mixture models. And also it shows that the DAEM part provides a global optimal solution for the parameter estimation in a mixture model and the natural color images are segmented efficiently by using the GMM with components estimated by MS-DAEM algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.