Joint learning framework of superpixel generation and fuzzy sparse subspace clustering for color image segmentation.

• A joint learning model for superpixel-based fuzzy sparse subspace clustering is established. • A four-level alteration iterative algorithm for superpixel-based image segmentation is proposed. • A centroid shift strategy suitable for image contents is used to generate superpixels. • Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm has very good performance. Sparse subspace clustering (SSC) is an important image segmentation method that constructs a self-representation coefficient matrix to represent the relationships between pixels, and then uses spectral clustering to achieve clustering. Compared with other unsupervised segmentation algorithms, SSC has good segmentation performance. However, SSC has a high computational complexity when processing large-sized image. To improve computational efficiency, many researchers have proposed superpixel-based SSC algorithms, which process superpixels instead of pixels and improve efficiency through preprocessing. Due to the sensitivity of superpixel generation to noise, superpixel-based SSC algorithms still have poor robustness. Additionally, preprocessing increases the complexity of the algorithm. To address these issues, this paper proposes a robust superpixel-based fuzzy sparse subspace clustering algorithm. This algorithm combines fuzzy sparse subspace clustering with superpixel generation, and it constructs a unified optimization learning framework through fuzzy C-multiple-means clustering to improve segmentation performance and reduce complexity. Additionally, this paper introduces additional features of superpixel in sparse subspace clustering to further enhance the segmentation performance of the algorithm. Experiment results indicate that the proposed algorithm not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art robust segmentation algorithms independent of superpixels, but also is superior to the latest superpixel-based segmentation algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]