Patent ID: 6839462

Claim:
A method of classifying grey scale image data according to different region types within the image, the method comprising: assigning a single feature value to each datum; reducing the resolution of each value of the data; generating a histogram of the reduced resolution value data; and, performing a fast fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm on all of the histogram data, so as to minimize a fuzzy object function J m (W, v), wherein J m (W, v) is defined by the equation J m ⁡ ( W , v ) = ∑ g = G min G max ⁢ ⁢ ∑ i = 1 c ⁢ ⁢ f ⁡ ( g ) ⁢ ( w ig ) nl ⁢ ( d ig ) 2 , using generated values f(g) of said reduced resolution histogram, and wherein: c represents a number of clusters in the image; G min and G max represent respectively a minimum and maximum grey scale value q in the image; m is a fuzzy weighting exponent; w is a fuzzy partition of the histogram data with entries w ig which correspond to a membership value of each grey scale value g in a cluster i of the image; and, d ig is a Euclidian distance between a grey scale value q and v 1 .