Multi-elitist immune clonal quantum clustering algorithm

The quantum clustering (QC) algorithm suffers from the issues of getting stuck in local extremes and computational bottleneck when handling large-size image segmentation. By embedding a potential evolution formula into affinity function calculation of multi-elitist immune clonal optimization, and updating the cluster center based on the distance matrix, the multi-elitist immune clonal quantum clustering algorithm (ME-ICQC) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed framework, elitist population is composed of the individuals with high affinity, which is considered to play dominant roles in the evolutionary process. It can help to find the global optimal solution or near-optimal solution for most tested tasks. The diversity of population can be well maintained by general subgroup evolution of ME-ICQC. These different functions are implemented by the dissimilar mutation strategies or crossover operators. The bi-group exchanges the information of excellence antibodies using the hypercube coevolution operation. Compared with existing algorithms, the ME-ICQC achieves an improved clustering accuracy with more stable convergence, but it is not significantly better than other optimization techniques combined with QC. Also, the experimental results also show that our algorithm performs well on multi-class, parameters-sensitive and large-size datasets. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.