Superpixels-Based Automatic Density Peaks and Fuzzy Clustering Approach in COVID-19 Lung Segmentation

Clustering algorithms that rely on minimizing an objective function suffer from the drawback of requiring manual setting of the number of clusters. This limitation becomes particularly evident when applied to image segmentation, where the large number of pixels can lead to memory overflow issues. To overcome this challenge, a reference of Automatic Fuzzy Clustering Framework (AFCF) for image segmentation method has been used as the comparison to the Density Peaks Clustering (DPC) algorithm. AFCF used superpixel algorithm to reduce the spatial information of data during computation, DPC algorithm to generate decision graph, and prior entropy-based fuzzy clustering (PEFC) algorithm to achieve fully automatic segmentation method in determining the number of cluster and the clustering result. In this study, 50 open-source healthy, COVID-19 and pneumonia infected radiographs dataset are acquired from the Kaggle and Github. The radiographs dataset that segmented by DPC is down sampling to 100*100 pixels due to overloading computation. At the end of the image segmentation, a segmentation performance evaluation is conducted based on sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, precision, recall, F-score and time consumed. The result shows that AFCF algorithm has the better overall performance with higher accuracy of 92.48% and F-score 0.9455. Meanwhile, the most highlighted evaluation index is drop to the time consume comparison, AFCF has around 2.7 times faster processing speed compare to DPC algorithm.