Performance Comparison of Evolutionary Algorithms for Image Clustering

Evolutionary computation tools are able to process real valued numerical sets in order to extract suboptimal solution of designed problem. Data clustering algorithms have been intensively used for image segmentation in remote sensing applications. Despite of wide usage of evolutionary algorithms on data clustering, their clustering performances have been scarcely studied by using clustering validation indexes. In this paper, the recently proposed evolutionary algorithms (i.e., Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC), Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA), Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CS), Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm (JADE), Differential Search Algorithm (DSA) and Backtracking Search Optimization Algorithm (BSA)) and some classical image clustering techniques (i.e., k-means, fcm, som networks) have been used to cluster images and their performances have been compared by using four clustering validation indexes. Experimental test results exposed that evolutionary algorithms give more reliable cluster-centers than classical clustering techniques, but their convergence time is quite long.