Normalized cut (Ncut) is one of the popular image segmentation models in which the parametric similarity matrix should be given in advance. In this paper, we propose a normalized cut segmentation algorithm with an adaptive similarity measure and spatial regularization. The statistical Parzen-Rosenblatt window, expectation maximum (EM) method and the regularization technique in partial differential equation (PDE) are unified in a proposed variational framework. The introduced EM strategy makes our method can adaptively update the similarity matrix, and it can produce a better classification criterion than the existing Ncut based methods. While the regularization can guarantee the proposed algorithm has a robust performance under noise and it can also rectify the similarity measure with a priori spatial location. In addition, the existence theorem of the proposed model is given in the paper. Compared with some existing spectral clustering methods such as the traditional Ncut algorithm and the variational based Chan-Vese model, the numerical experiments show that our methods can provide promising segmentation results.
Definition A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is a parametric probability density function represented as a weighted sum of Gaussian component densities. GMMs are commonly used as a parametric model of the probability distribution of continuous measurements or features in a biometric system, such as vocal-tract related spectral features in a speaker recognition system. GMM parameters are estimated from training data using the iterative Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm or Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation from a well-trained prior model.