A genetic algorithm for color image segmentation

A genetic algorithm for color image segmentation is proposed. The method represents an image as a weighted undirected graph, where nodes correspond to pixels, and edges connect similar pixels. Similarity between two pixels is computed by taking into account not only brightness, but also color and texture content. Experiments on images from the Berkeley Image Segmentation Dataset show that the method is able to partition natural and human scenes in a number of regions consistent with human visual perception. A quantitative evaluation of the method compared with other approaches shows that the genetic algorithm can be very competitive in partitioning color images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.