Color image segmentation by gravitational clustering in color space using neighbor-relationship

In this paper, we propose a color image segmentation method based on gravitational clustering using neighbor relations in the spatial domain and distance information in RGB space among pixels. Most clustering-based segmentation algorithms use only color space distances after pixels are mapped from the spatial domain to color space, ignoring their neighbor relations; but we use both information. We use gravitational clustering, which imitates the Law of Gravity, and the gravitational force is applied only to neighboring clusters. The results show that the proposed method is effective in finding exact boundaries of regions.