Automatic flower boundary extraction using ipsoantk-means algorithm

Automatic flower boundary extraction is an important part of flower image recognition and retrieval. Identifying a flower of interest or segmenting against the background is a difficult task. We proposed and developed a hybrid automatic flower boundary extraction method called IPSOAntK-means based on swarm intelligence techniques in this article. The method employs ant colony optimization, incremental particle swarm optimization (IPSO), and K-means algorithms and it is the first swarm-based technique in flower segmentation on color images. The parameters of the algorithm are tuned by iterated F-race and experiments are conducted over two different benchmark data sets: CAVIAR-Flower and Oxford 17 flowers data sets. In the CAVIAR-flower data set, IPSOAntK-means outperformed K-means with 96.4% accuracy on average over 600 colored flower images. Comparison results of the Oxford flower data set show that our method is one of the best flower segmentation methods in the literature. Copyright © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC