Abstract

Image segmentation plays a critical role in many image analysis applications. However, it is ill-defined in nature and remains one of the most intractable problems in image processing. In this thesis, we propose a genetic programming based algorithm for image segmentation (GPIS). Typically, genetic programming is a Darwinian-evolution inspired program discovery method and in the past it has been successfully used as an automatic programming tool. We make use of this property of GP to evolve efficient and accurate image segmentation programs from a pool of basic image analysis operators. In addition, we provide no a priori information about that nature of the images to the GP. The algorithm was tested on two separate medical image databases and results show the proposed GP's ability to adapt and produce short and accurate segmentation algorithms, irrespective of the database in use. We compared our results with a popular GA based image segmentation/classification system, GENIE Pro. We found that our proposed algorithm produced accurate image segmentations performed consistently on both databases and could possibly be extended to other image databases as a general-purpose image segmentation tool.