Parallel Implementation of Bias Field Correction Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm for Image Segmentation

Abstract

—Image segmentation in the medical field is one of the most important phases to diseases diagnosis. The bias field estimation algorithm is the most interesting techniques to correct the in-homogeneity intensity artifact on the image. However, the use of such technique requires a powerful processing and quite expensive for big size as medical images. Hence the idea of parallelism becomes increasingly required. Several researchers have followed this path mainly in the bioinformatics field where they have suggested different algorithms implementations. In this paper, a novel Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture for bias field estimation and image segmentation algorithm is proposed. In order to accelerate compute-intensive portions of the sequential implementation, we have implemented this algorithm on three different graphics processing units (GPU) cards named GT740m, GTX760 and GTX580 respectively, using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software programming tool. Numerical obtained results for the computation speed up, allowed us to conclude on the suitable GPU architecture for this kind of applications and closest ones.