Aggregation Pheromone Density Based Image Segmentation

Abstract

Ants, bees and other social insects deposit pheromone (a type of chemical) in order to communicate between the members of their community. Pheromone that causes clumping or clustering behavior in a species and brings individuals into a closer proximity is called aggrega-tion pheromone. This paper presents a novel method for image segmen-tation considering the aggregation behavior of ants. Image segmentation is viewed as a clustering problem which aims to partition a given set of pixels into a number of homogenous clusters/segments. At each location of data point representing a pixel an ant is placed; and the ants are allowed to move in the search space to find out the points with higher pheromone density. The movement of an ant is governed by the amount of pheromone deposited at different points of the search space. More the deposited pheromone, more is the aggregation of ants. This leads to the formation of homogenous groups of data. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a number of images using different cluster validity measures. Results are compared with those obtained using average linkage and k-means clustering algorithms and are found to be better.