K-hyperline clustering-based color image segmentation robust to illumination changes

Abstract

Color image segmentation is very important in the field of image processing as it is commonly used for image semantic recognition, image searching, video surveillance or other applications. Although clustering algorithms have been successfully applied for image segmentation, conventional clustering algorithms such as K-means clustering algorithms are not sufficiently robust to illumination changes, which is common in real-world environments. Motivated by the observation that the RGB value distributions of the same color under different illuminations are located in an identical hyperline, we formulate color classification as a hyperline clustering problem. We then propose a K-hyperline clustering algorithm-based color image segmentation approach. Experiments on both synthetic and real images demonstrate the outstanding performance and robustness of the proposed algorithm as compared to existing clustering algorithms.