Scheme for unsupervised colour-texture image segmentation using neutrosophic set and non-subsampled contourlet transform

The process of partitioning an image into some different meaningful regions with the homogeneous characteristics is called the image segmentation which is a crucial task in image analysis. This study presents an efficient scheme for unsupervised colour–texture image segmentation using neutrosophic set (NS) and nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). First, the image colour and texture information are extracted via CIE Luv colour space model and NSCT, respectively. Then, the extracted colour and texture information are transformed into the NS domain efficiently by the authors’ proposed approach. In the NS-based image segmentation, the indeterminacy assessment of the images in the NS domain is notified by the entropy concept. The lower quantity of indeterminacy in the NS domain, the higher confidence and easier segmentation could be achieved. Therefore, to achieve a better segmentation result, an appropriate indeterminacy reduction operation is proposed. Finally, the K-means clustering algorithm is applied to perform the image segmentation in which the cluster number K is determined by the cluster validity analysis. To show the effectiveness of their proposed method, its performance is compared with that of the state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results reveal that their segmentation scheme outperforms the other methods for the Berkeley dataset.