Particle swarm optimization method for image clustering

An image clustering method that is based on the particle swarm optimizer (PSO) is developed in this paper. The algorithm finds the centroids of a user specified number of clusters, where each cluster groups together with similar image primitives. To illustrate its wide applicability, the proposed image classifier has been applied to synthetic, MRI and satellite images. Experimental results show that the PSO image classifier performs better than state-of-the-art image classifiers (namely, K-means, Fuzzy C-means. K-Harmonic means and Genetic Algorithms) in all measured criteria. The influence of different values of PSO control parameters on performance is also illustrated. © World Scientific Publishing Company.