Abstract
A method to automatic extraction of brain tissue from CT images for content-based image retrieval is proposed based on fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm with spatial constraints. In order to reduce the computation time, the modes of the three major components of the CT head image, the background, the soft tissue and the skull, are estimated, which can be used as the initial clusters centroids in the following clustering stage. The characteristics of this method is that the extraction process is parameter-free and completely automatic, hence, it dose not need any user interactions. The proposed method has been validated on real CT head images and has shown satisfactory results.
