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DOI: 10.1177/0037549712445233
2012 88: 1202 originally published online 22 May 2012 SIMULATION
Khamron Sunat, Panida Padungweang and Sirapat Chiewchanwattana
Generalized Transport Mean Shift algorithm for ubiquitous intelligence

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Simulation
Simulation: Transactions of the Society for
Modeling and Simulation International
88(10) 12021215
2012 The Society for Modeling and
Simulation International
DOI: 10.1177/0037549712445233
sim.sagepub.com
Generalized Transport Mean Shift
algorithm for ubiquitous intelligence
Khamron Sunat
1
, Panida Padungweang
2
and
Sirapat Chiewchanwattana
1
Abstract
Much research has been conducted recently relating to ubiquitous intelligent computing. Ubiquitous intelligence-enabled
techniques, such as clustering and image segmentation, have focused on the development of intelligence methodologies. In
this paper, a simultaneous mode-seeking and clustering algorithm called the Generalized Transport Mean Shift (GTMS)
was introduced. The data points were designated as the transportertrailer characteristic. The important concept of
transportation was used to solve the problem of redundant computations of mode-seeking algorithms. The time com-
plexity of the GTMS algorithm is much lower than that of the Mean Shift (MS) algorithm. This means it is able to be used
in a problem that has a very high data point, in particular, the segmentation of images containing the green vegetation. The
proposed algorithm was tested on clustering and image-segmentation problems. The experimental results showed that
the GTMS algorithm improves upon the existing algorithms in terms of both accuracy and time consumption. The GTMS
algorithms highest speed is also 333.98 times faster than that of the standard MS algorithm. The redundancy computation
can be reduced by omitting more than 90% of the data points at the third iteration of the mode-seeking process. This is
because GTMS algorithm mainly reduces the data in the mode-seeking process. Thus, use of the GTMS algorithm would
allow for the building of an intelligent portable device for surveying green vegetables in a ubiquitous environment.
Keywords
Mean Shift algorithm, agglomerative mean shift clustering, Generalized Transport Mean Shift algorithm, image segmenta-
tion, clustering, mode seeking, ubiquitous intelligence
1. Introduction
Ubiquitous intelligence computing is widely dedicated to
research on the technologies used to improve the intelli-
gence capability of multimedia devices. In this situation,
the intelligence capacity to elaborate, extract information,
and improve the quality of the extracted information from
the environment is crucial. The development of ubiquitous
intelligence, such as data analysis, image analysis, pattern
analysis, and computer vision, is also addressed. The clus-
tering problem is an important process in data analysis.
Computer vision problems, such as video and motion
estimation, require an appropriate area of support for cor-
respondence operations. The area of support can be identi-
fied using segmentation techniques. Pattern recognition
problems can also make use of segmentation results in
matching. Consequently, image segmentation and cluster-
ing are important processes in ubiquitous intelligence com-
puting and are used for analyzing and investigating the
nature of the given data. A powerful technique for solving
this problem is to automatically find the mode of density
of the given data. Normally the algorithm is informed by
the data density. The local maximums of the density sur-
face are assumed to be the modes or the centers of clusters.
All data points are computed to find their modes. The data
points that have the same mode will be assigned to be in
the same cluster. The algorithm is useful for clustering,
1,2
image segmentation,
3,4
and tracking.
5
However, finding
the mode of all of the data points requires a repeated pro-
cess, which is very time consuming. The Generalized
Transport Mean Shift (GTMS) algorithm and its variation
are extensively proposed to overcome this difficulty.
The Mean Shift (MS) algorithm is a powerful technique
for seeking the modes of any given data. The standard MS
algorithm is an iterative procedure that can automatically
find the mode of density of a data point. It begins by
1
Department of Computer Science, Khon Kaen University, Thailand
2
Department of Mathematics, Statistic and Computer, Ubon Ratchathani
University, Thailand
Corresponding author:
Khamron Sunat, Department of Computer Science, Khon Kaen
University, Khon Kaen, 40002, Thailand.
Email: khamron_sunat@yahoo.com
at Bibliotheques de l'Universite Lumiere Lyon 2 on November 4, 2012 sim.sagepub.com Downloaded from
computing the weight of all points by the function of their
distances from the considered point. The next step is to
compute the weighted mean point to get the shift position.
This changes iteratively because of density and increases
until the shift position is not changed or is changed less
than the acceptable distance. It is assumed that this posi-
tion is the mode of the considering point and all data
points that converge into the same mode will also be
assumed to be the same cluster. However, the standard
MS algorithm process is very slow because its time com-
plexity is O(kn
2
m).
6
This makes it unsuitable for use,
especially in image-segmentation applications, such as the
segmentation of images containing green vegetation,
which have a very high data point. Improving the speed of
the MS algorithm by reducing the computational complex-
ity is, therefore, very important.
Techniques to speed up the MS algorithm were fre-
quently proposed. A speed-up technique of neural network
learning was applied to the MS algorithm, as proposed by
Padungweing et al.;
7
this allowed it to perform at greater
speeds than the previous version, whilst also retaining the
accuracy of the original. Following this, the speed up of
the Gaussian Blurring Mean Shift (GBMS) algorithm has
been proposed
6
by clustering the data in each iteration and
removing the cluster that has some data converted to its
mode. Thus, the next iteration will have less data, allowing
for faster computing. However, the GBMS algorithm can
produce different results when compared to the standard
MS algorithm. This is because the density estimation is
computed using the current position in each iteration, but
the density estimation of the standard one is usually com-
puted using the initial position of the given data set.
Several methods that can improve the speed of the MS
algorithm for image segmentation were proposed.
8
Firstly,
the neighborhood pixels are grouped into the same cell and
then the MS algorithm was used. The cell that is shifted
into the shifted cell in the previous iteration will stop com-
puting and will be assumed to be the same cluster.
Secondly, the neighborhood pixels in the spatial domain,
which are indicated by the specific distance, are grouped
into the same cluster and the process continues as in the
first method. Both methods produced excellent speed ups.
However, a wrong clustering result can occur, even in the
first step of clustering the group of points. The remaining
two methods approximate the E (Expectation) and M
(Maximization) steps in each iteration using a subset of the
data and the quadratic convergence technique, which
helped to decrease the number of iterations. However, this
requires high computation, resulting in less help in speed-
ing up as hoped. The Improved Fast Gaussian Transform
Mean Shift (IFGT-MS) algorithm
9
adopts the improved
Gaussian transform for numerical approximation. It is very
efficient for large-scale and high-dimensional data sets.
However, the IFGT-MS algorithm not only is limited to
the Gaussian kernel function but also it fails on moderate
scale data.
10,11
Based on the best of the authors knowl-
edge, the recently and much proposed algorithm is
Agglomerative Mean Shift (Agglo-MS) clustering.
10,11
Covering hyper ellipsoids were used to cluster data itera-
tively, which leads to hierarchical clustering via the MS
process. The covering hyper ellipsoids need to compute
the inverse of the covariant matrix, which is an extra cost
and biased by data dimension. It can also produce a poor
result if the parameter is not properly selected. However,
this algorithm inspired us by demonstrating the use benefit
of the hill climbing algorithm, where many data points are
shifted though the same direction.
In this paper, the GTMS algorithm is proposed for intel-
ligence modeling. The basic idea of the MS algorithm,
which is the shift process, is presented in this algorithm.
However, instead of finding the mode of all points, the
GTMS algorithm requires few points, called transporters,
which are representing their trailers. Moreover, finding
the transporters does not require any extra cost, because
the GTMS algorithm uses the distance values that must be
computed in the shifting process. The trailers are the data
points that are shifted into the same mode as a transporter.
The relationship transportertrailer is investigated by
considering the direction of the transporters trajectory and
the trailers shift direction. The trailers are excluded for
the next iteration and only the transporters are computed.
In addition, a transporter can be assigned as a trailer in a
next iteration; this not only reduces the number of trans-
porters to be computed, but also performs a simultaneous
hierarchical clustering.
In Section 2, we briefly explain the nature of the MS
algorithm and the Agglo-MS algorithm. The GTMS algo-
rithm will be introduced and proposed in Section 3. The
experimental results on real-world clustering, image-
segmentation problems and discussion will be described in
Section 4. Section 5 is the conclusion.
2. Standard Mean Shift algorithm and
Agglomerative Mean Shift algorithm
Let XR
m
be a data set in an m-dimensional Euclidean
space of n data points. X = (x
1
, x
2
, ., x
n
) and x
i
= [x
1
, x
2
,
., x
m,
]
T
. A probability density estimation of a given data
x is defined by
p(x) =
1
n

n
i =1
K (x x
i
)= k k
2
_ _
; 1
where K(t) is a kernel function and s is a constant band-
width such that s>0. A mode of the density is a position
x having zero gradient, rp(x) =0: The MS algorithm is an
iterative procedure for seeking the mode of density estima-
tion with repeated shifting of the position x towards high
density and is written as
Sunat et al. 1203
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x
( +1)
=f (x
()
); 2
with
f (x) =

n
i =1
K
0
(x x
i
)= k k
2
_ _
x
i

n
j =1
K
0
(x x
j
)
_

_
_
_
_
2
_ _ ; 3
where K(t) = dK/dt and is the iteration index. Using the
Gaussian function K(t) = e
-t/2
, (2) and (3) can be reduced
12
to
x
( +1)
=

n
i =1
p(ijx
()
)x
i
4
and
p(ijx
()
) =
exp (
1
2
(x
()
x
i
)
_

_
_
_
_
2
)

n
j =1
exp (
1
2
(x
()
x
j
)
_

_
_
_
_
2
)
: 5
The algorithm will be terminated if the shift distance is
equal to zero or is less than a tolerant threshold as follows:
x
()
x
(1)
_
_
_
_
threshold: 6
The clustering is performed by representing each mode of
the kernel density estimate as the cluster and the data
points are converged to their corresponding modes. This
idea of plotting two clusters can be depicted graphically,
as shown in Figure 1(a). Figure 1(b) shows that data points
are shifted rising toward their mode. The solid black lines
represent the trajectory of each data point.
The Agglo-MS
10,11
is an agglomerative MS clustering
algorithm. It is built upon an iterative query set compres-
sion mechanism motivated by the quadratic bounding opti-
mization characteristic of the MS algorithm. It performs
well on segmentation of images and clustering of moder-
ate scale data sets. Since the space is limited, the interested
reader is directed to Yuan et al.
10,11
3. Generalized Transport Mean Shift
algorithm
In general, there are many positions shifting through the
same trajectory and trying to place themselves at their mode,
as the example shows in Figure 1. Considering Figure 2, the
i
th
data is shifted to the position that is closed to the original
position of the k
th
data at iteration . Also, the direction of
the shift vector of ith data is in parallel to the trajectory vec-
tor of the kth data. Therefore, the ith data should be consid-
ered as the trailer of the kth data, which is assumed to be a
transporter of the ith data. Hence, the shifting of the ith
data need not be computed in the next iteration.
Even though the jth data at iteration is also shifted to
the position near the original position of the kth data, its
mode is different from the mode of the kth data. One of
the main ideas of this work is that the nearest point that is
assigned as the transporter should have the same direction
of trajectory vector as the direction of the shift vector of
the trailer.
In order to acquire the solution, four matrices are intro-
duced. The first matrix is a matrix of the trajectory vector
of all the data points. The second matrix stores the indexes
of the transporters. The last two matrices are logical, indi-
cating the convergence status and the present status of the
data points. The details of each matrix are as follows.
Let UR
mxn
. The ith column of U, denoted by u
i
, is a
unit trajectory vector of the ith data at the first iteration
and can be computed as
Figure 1. (a) The plotting of two data clusters. (b) The trajectory of data point by applying the Mean Shift algorithm to a two-
dimensional data set. The third axis denotes density of data.
1204 Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International 88(10)
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u
i
=
x
1
i
x
0
i
x
1
i
x
0
i
k k
: 7
Let TR
1xn
be a transporter matrix, where the ith column
of T denoted by t
i
is an index of a transporter of the ith
data, such that
t
i
=
arg min
j
x

i
x

j
_
_
_
_
_
_
2
_ _
if

ij

i otherwise;
_
_
_
8
where a is a constant threshold.

ij
denotes the generalized
angle between the trajectory vector (u
j
) and the shift vector
(v

i
). is in the range of [0 1] and is defined by

ij
=
1
2
(1
v

i
u
j
v

i
j j u
j

): 9
The vectors are parallel and have the same direction, if =
0. If = 1, the vectors are still parallel but have an opposite
direction of 180 degrees.
The last two matrices are C
1xn
, the matrix of the con-
vergence status, and A
1xn
, the matrix of the present status.
a
i
is the ith column of A and c
i
is the ith column of C,
expressed as follows:
c
i
=
1
0
_
_
_
if the i
th
data converge
otherwise
; 10
a
i
=
1
0
_
_
_
if the i
th
data should be present
to the next iteration
otherwise
: 11
The GTMS algorithm is shown as pseudo-code Algorithm
1. To reiterate, the trajectory vector is computed in step 2
and is assigned in step 5. Step 6, 9, and 10 are normally
performed by the MS algorithm. If the transporter of the
ith data is, however, found in step 8, then step 9 need not
be computed, which is computing the exponential of all
the distance values in step 6 using (5). Furthermore, the
shift position of the ith data is assigned to t
i
. We imagine
that the more trailers found then the less data that needs to
be computed in the next iteration.
Algorithm1 (GTMS)
Initialization:
C is initialized to false.
A is initialized to true.
Initialize the value of parameter D.
for each x
i
X do
1. Compute x
i
1

2. Calculate the shift distance and the trajectory vector
Set z = x
W
i
- x
i

Set s = ||z||
2

Set v
i
= z/s
0.5

3. Considering the convergence
if s threshold then
c
i
= true , a
i
= false
end if
4. Set i
th
to be a transporter itself, t
i
= i
end for
5. Set W = 1, U=V // u
i
is a unit trajectory vector
while these are a
i
= true do
6.Calculate the distance (d
k
) from x
W
i
to x
k
X,1 k n
7. Find the j
th
data that nearest to the i
th
data
j = argmin
k
d
k
8.Investigate the transporter
Compute G =(1- v
W
i
u
j
/ |v
W
i
||u
j
|)
if i j & t
i
i & G d D then
set t
i
= j, a
i
= false // assign transporter
and inactive trailer
else
9. Compute x
i
W+1

10. Follow step 2 and 3
end if
Increate the number of iteration by setting W = W+1.
HQGwhile
According to step 8, the transporter of the ith data is
found and assigned to t
i
. This means that the ith data
should move toward the same mode as its transporter.
Hierarchical clustering is simultaneously performed in this
step using matrix T. At the convergence step, the depth-
first search algorithm
13
is used for retrieving all the trailers
of the remaining transporters. At the convergence step,
each cluster may have several transporters assigned in the
same cluster. Thus, it would be easy to perform clustering
for those transporters by using the distance threshold. The
appropriate value of threshold is a proportion of the band-
width of a density estimator. In this paper we use half of
the bandwidth to be the desired threshold.
Although there is an additional parameter () in our
algorithm, this parameter makes the algorithm more flex-
ible. It is used for choosing a suitable transportertrailer
relationship. Normally, is between [0, 1]. For = 0, the
trailer is transported by the transporter; only the shift vec-
tor of the trailer and the trajectory vector of the transporter
are parallel. For = 1, the angle of the vectors in the range
of 0180 degrees is acceptable. Hence, the value of (8) is
spanned in range [0,1]. However, the parameter can be
Figure 2. Trajectory vector of x
k
, which is assigned to be the
transporter and shift direction of x
i
and x
j
at iteration .
Sunat et al. 1205
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assigned out of this range. In the case of > 1, the near-
est position of the shift position at the ith data is always
assigned to be the transporter of the ith. In this case, the
GTMS algorithm is the fastest. Once < 0, there is no
transporter to be assigned. In this case, the GTMS algo-
rithm performs as the standard MS algorithm. Therefore,
the MS algorithm can be considered as a special case of
the proposed GTMS algorithm.
The value of a can be adapted in each iteration.
According to the nature of a mode-seeking algorithm, the
data that belongs to a different mode will be shifted far
from each other when the number of iterations is increased.
A technique for adjusting a is also provided in this paper.
Let
0
be an initial value and

be a maximum acceptable
threshold at iteration . The value of can be assigned as
= min (

,
0
+(

)i); 12
where i denotes the number of iterations. The value of
can linearly be increased from
0
to

when the number

of iterations reaches iteration .
Our claim is that the GTMS process is much faster than
the MS algorithm because the trailers will be excluded for
the next iteration. The time complexity of the GTMS algo-
rithm is O(nm

p
i =1
q
i
), where q
p
. . . q
2
( q
1
=n
and q
i
denotes the number of active data points at iteration
i. The space complexity of the GTMS algorithm is O(nm).
4. Experimental results
The GTMS algorithm was tested on clustering and image-
segmentation problems. In general, density estimator-
based algorithms need a desired bandwidth; this is still an
open problem and is beyond the scope of this paper.
Consequently, we experimentally selected some suitable
bandwidths for comparison. The algorithms were tested on
the same parameters and environment. Some notations are
introduced for short naming. MS1 denotes the standard
MS algorithm, as in Yang et al.
9
MS2 denotes the standard
MS algorithm with excluded converge points for the next
iteration. GTMS1 denotes the fastest GTMS algorithm by
choosing > 1 and GTMS2 denotes a GTMS algorithm
with
0
= 0,

= 0.5, and = 10. The tolerance threshold

is set to 10
7
for all experiments. MS1, MS2, GTMS1,
and GTMS2 are coded in MATLAB software. The MS
and Agglo-MS algorithms were downloaded from the
website of Yuan (Yuan et al.
11
) at http://sites.google.com/
site/xtyuan1980/publications. They are coded in C++.
4.1 Clustering
Experiments were conducted to evaluate the accuracy of
the proposed algorithm. The algorithm was tested using
real-world data sets from the University of California,
Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository,
14
such as iris,
soybean, and blood. The bandwidth of the density estimator
was selected by repeatedly applying the standard MS algo-
rithm with different bandwidths until the number of clusters
produced by the algorithm was equal to the real one. Every
algorithm was now governed using the same bandwidth.
The average accuracies of the clustering results are shown
in Table 1 and the speed ups are shown in Figure 3. It can
be observed that the GTMS algorithm was not only a fast
algorithm, but it also achieved more accurate clustering
results than the standard MS algorithm. For the blood data
set, every algorithm achieved the same level of accuracy
results; GTMS1, however, took less time than the other
algorithms. GTMS1 archived 100% clustering accuracy for
the soybean data set, showing an increased speed of up to
8.31 times faster than MS1.
4.2 Image segmentation
The algorithms were evaluated on image segmentation
using 6 well known images, Hand, Lena, Hawk, House,
Small bowel loop, and 3 green vegetable images(15);
vegetable (F) , vegetable (D), and vegetable (B). A pixel
of the first four images was decomposed to a five-
dimensional vector (x, y, R, G, B). The first two dimen-
sions were normalized to range [1,100] in order to reduce
the effect of the images size. The last three images were
decomposed as in Liying et al.
15
and (x, y, G-R, G-B, H, S,
I) with (x, y) were normalized to range [1, 20]. The aver-
age times consumed on the 10 experiments and the speed
up of the GTMS algorithm with different bandwidths of
Figure 3. The averages speed up on 10 experiments of GTMS
algorithm compare with MS1 and MS2, respectively.
Table 1. Average accuracy results on 10 experiments of the
clustering.
Data set Accuracy (%)
MS1 MS2 GTMS1 GTMS2
Iris 62.67 62.67 84 82
Soybean 98.87 98.87 100 98.87
Blood 76.47 76.47 76.47 76.47
1206 Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International 88(10)
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density estimator are shown in Table 2. As for the compar-
ison of the MS and the Agglo-MS algorithms, all seven
images are used and preprocessed using the script pro-
vided by Yuan (Yuan et al.
11
). Their running times cannot
be compared with the proposed algorithms because they
are run by the different systems.
The results in Table 2 show that GTMS1 achieved a
speed up of 81333 times faster than MS1 and 853 times
faster than MS2. Moreover, GTMS2, which performed a
result approximate to the MS algorithm, achieved speeds
rising to 223 and 23 times faster than MS1 and MS2,
respectively. Because the Vegetable (F), (D), and (B)
image consisted of many pixels (greater than 30,000) and
the progression of MS1 was very slow, we did not per-
form this problem. Looking at Table 3, for the Vegetable
(F) image, the number of active data points of GTMS1 in
the second iteration remained at only 15 data points. This
means that there were huge trailers that were shifted to
the same direction of the transporter. The GTMS
algorithm excluded those points for the next iteration,
while the MS algorithm still computed a shift direction
for them. All points remained for MS2, since there were
no conversed points in this iteration. The numbers of
active data points of the first five iterations of all images
using different algorithms are shown in Table 3. It can be
seen that GTMS1 gave the fewest active data points at
iteration 5 for all images. The speed ups of the proposed
GTMS algorithm compared with MS1 and MS2 are
shown in Figure 4. The results show that GTMS1 gave a
better speed-up result than GTMS2 for almost all case
studies of the images. Figure 5 shows that the accuracy of
GTMS1 is comparable to GTMS2. Finally, it can be
observed that GTMS1 significantly reduced unnecessary
computation when the iteration increased. Less than 10%
of the data points of all images remained at the end of the
second iteration using GTMS1. For the Vegetable (F)
image, there were only 0.04% of the data points still
active at the end of the second iteration.
Table 2. The average time consuming of image segmentation on 10 experiments and the speed up of the Generalized Transport
Mean Shift (GTMS) algorithm compared with MS1 and MS2.
Data set s Average time (seconds)
MS1 MS2 GTMS1 GTMS2
Time Time Time Speed up Time Speed up
MS1 MS2 MS1 MS2
Hand 500 747.73 73.19 2.98 250.53 24.52 12.92 57.84 5.66
200 643.89 64.35 3.15 204.13 20.40 9.20 69.98 6.99
Lena 500 304.60 49.20 1.84 165.51 26.74 6.30 48.33 7.81
200 577.83 57.29 2.42 238.41 23.64 6.97 82.85 8.22
Hawk 500 1442.80 134.22 4.32 333.81 31.05 12.05 119.73 11.14
200 1477.17 252.16 4.72 312.62 53.37 10.62 139.00 23.73
Houses 500 500.00 75.61 3.82 130.66 19.76 13.20 37.85 5.72
200 1215.16 154.81 4.15 292.38 37.25 12.11 100.29 12.78
Cameraman 400 124.07 25.51 1.53 81.21 16.70 3.78 32.85 6.75
200 174.04 36.10 1.57 110.91 23.00 3.84 45.35 9.41
Small bowel 100 456.48 36.49 2.16 211.51 16.91 2.46 185.64 14.84
loops 90 501.23 38.06 2.21 226.72 17.22 2.24 223.80 17.00
Vegetable (F) 100 5327.93 604.82 8.81 1822.47 2.92
50 8499.35 606.04 14.02 1525.82 5.57
Vegetable (D) 100 13,274.20 476.49 16.88 1085.72 7.41
50 13,274.20 475.38 27.92 709.43 18.71
Vegetable (B) 100 3964.05 458.62 8.64 796.45 4.98
50 6729.63 455.16 14.79 662.88 10.15
Table 3. The sample of numbers of active data points of the first five iterations for three algorithms MS2, GTMS1 and GTMS2.
Data set s MS2 GTMS1 GTMS2
Hand 500 3100, 3100, 3100, 3100, 3100 3100, 82, 19, 10, 7 3100, 1822, 1352, 1224, 1094
Lena 500 2500, 2500, 2500, 2500, 2500 2500, 211, 42, 17, 6 2500, 1556, 985, 720, 593
Hawk 500 3750, 3750, 3750, 3750, 3750 3750, 157, 29, 16, 9 3750, 1432, 991, 829, 749
Houses 500 3750, 3750, 3750, 3750, 3750 3750, 104, 20, 13, 10 3750, 2163, 1254, 1066, 955
Lena 500 2500, 2500, 2500, 2500, 2500 2500, 211, 42, 17, 6 2500, 1556, 985, 720, 593
Vegetable (F) 100 33,908, 33,908, 33,908, 33,908, 33,879 33,908, 15, 7, 3, 3 33,908, 23,797, 20,194, 19,456, 19,352
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The comparison of image-segmentation results of the
proposed algorithms and the competitive algorithm, Agglo-
MS, are shown in Table 4. The experiment is conducted on
seven images. The segmented images of the MS algorithm
are the base of the references. The percentage of pixel that
has the same color at the same location from the two
images is the metric for comparison. The higher percentage
represents the higher agreement of the two algorithms. The
Agglo-MS algorithm wins two out of seven. The proposed
algorithms win five out of seven. Furthermore, we can
observe that if the Agglo-MS algorithm wins, its score is a
little higher than that of the proposed algorithms. If the
proposed algorithm wins, some of its scores are much
higher than those of the Agglo-MS algorithm. Thus, the
proposed algorithm produces a segmented image that is
more similar to the result of the conventional MS cluster-
ing than the Agglo-MS clustering. The examples of those
images are depicted in Table 5.
Table 5. The examples of the results of image segmentation using the bandwidths in Table 3 are illustrated.
1. Hand 62 50 2. Lena 50 50 3. Hawk 75 50 4. Houses 75 50 5. Vegetable 176 173
Original image
MS
GTMS1
GTMS2
Agglo-MS
(default parameters)
Table 4. The percentage of agreement of segmented image
comparisons between MS1 versus GTMS1, Mean Shift (MS)
versus GTMS2, and MS versus Agglomerative Mean-Shift
(Agglo-MS).
Data set s GTMS1 GTMS2 Agglo-MS
(default
parameters)
Hand 500 98.35 98.74 99.31
200 97.13 98.77
Hawk 500 97.44 99.57 99.63
200 95.20 99.57
Houses 500 97.77 98.64 89.41
200 99.52 99.87
Lena 500 96.04 96.36 80.13
200 94.12 95.6
Vegetable (F) 100 99.77 99.99 99.33
50 99.96 99.96
Vegetable (D) 100 99.43 99.85 99.47
50 99.60 99.68
Vegetable (B) 100 99.87 99.94 87.79
50 99.77 99.89
Figure 5. The scatter plot of the percentage of the accuracy of
image segmentation by using the proposed GTMS1 and GTMS2
for nine images is shown.
Figure 4. The scatter plots of the speed up of the proposed
GTMS algorithm compared with MS1 and MS2.
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4.3 Challenging application
It is clear that the GTMS algorithms main advantage is a
reduction in the amount of data that needs to be computed.
We realized that the benefit of the GTMS algorithm is its
ability to reduce the number of active data points in the
computation. On the testing environment, it can success-
fully segment images with a large data point, that is,
Vegetable (F), Vegetable (D), and Vegetable (B). A chal-
lenging issue is actually implementing the model and
presenting an example of a ubiquitous application. In exist-
ing systems,
15
the segmentation rate of the images contain-
ing green vegetation using a MS procedure into the image
segmentation was improved. Then, the back-propagation
neural network was used for classifying the image into two
parts, that is, green and non-green vegetation. A similar
application governed by the proposed GTMS was done and
the results are shown in Figure 6. This result indicates that
it would be entirely possible to build an intelligent portable
device for surveying green vegetable sites.
Figure 6. The examples of the application of color segmentation of images containing green vegetable using the proposed
Generalized Transport Mean Shift algorithm are shown.
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4.4 Discussion
There was concern about the characteristic of the image
that affected the speed up of the proposed GTMS algo-
rithm. Therefore, all images were analyzed by principal
component analysis (PCA). The main point is to reduce the
data dimensionality. Next, the data densities of the images
were characterized by the direction of both the first compo-
nent and the second component. The scatter plot of the first
component, the second component, and the probability
density function are shown in Figures 715. In the cases of
Hawk, Vegetable (B), Vegetable (D), and Vegetable (F),
Figure 8. The original image of Lena (color; size 50 50 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal component analysis
(PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from the first component
and the second component of bandwidth 200 (c), and bandwidth 500 (d) are shown.
Figure 7. The original image of Cameraman (gray level, size 50 50 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal
component analysis (PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from
the first component and the second component of bandwidth 200 (c), and bandwidth 400 (d) are shown.
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two peaks of data density clearly shown separation as in
Figures 11, and 1315. The remaining images of
Cameraman, Lena, Hand, Small bowel loops, and Houses
show several peaks of data density in Figures 710, and
12. This showed that there are many clusters in each of the
rest images. It is revealed that the data density peaks of
Figure 10. The original image of Small bowel loops (gray level; size 65 50 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal
component analysis (PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from
the first component and the second component of bandwidth 90 (c), and bandwidth 100 (d) are shown.
Figure 9. The original image of Hand (color; size 50 50 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal component analysis
(PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from the first component
and the second component of bandwidth 200 (c), and bandwidth 500 (d) are shown.
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Cameraman, Lena, Hand, Houses, and Small bowel loops
differ less than the data density of Hawk, Vegetable (F),
Vegetable (B), and Vegetable (D). Considering the speed
up of the proposed GTMS algorithm shown in Table 2, we
can see that GTMS1 for Hawk achieved the highest speed
up at 333.98 times faster than MS1, and 53.42 times faster
Figure 11. The original image of Hawk (color; size 75 50 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal component
analysis (PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from the first
component and the second component of bandwidth 200 (c), and bandwidth 500 (d) are shown.
Figure 12. The original image of Houses (color; 75 50 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal component analysis
(PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from the first component
and the second component of bandwidth 200 (c), and bandwidth 500 (d) are shown.
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than MS2. These results support the claim that the greater
difference the data density has, the greater the speed up the
GTMS algorithm can achieve. However, this is a subjective
conclusion from the experimental results. An investigation
in more detail that focuses on this issue needs to be carried
out in future work.
Figure 14. The original image of Vegetable (D) (color; 200 150 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal component
analysis (PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from the first
component and the second component of bandwidth 50 (c), and bandwidth 100 (d) are shown.
Figure 13. The original image of Vegetable (B) (color; 200 150 pixels) is shown in (a). The scatter plot of principal component
analysis (PCA)-projected data is shown in (b). The three-dimensional surface showing the data density computed from the first
component and the second component of bandwidth 50 (c), and bandwidth 100 (d) are shown.
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5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed an intelligence modeling
algorithm called the GTMS algorithm. The GTMS algo-
rithm is an unsupervised simultaneous mode-seeking and
clustering algorithm, based on the idea of transportation.
The main advantage derived from this algorithm is its abil-
ity to reduce computing times. For image-segmentation
applications, the GTMS algorithm achieved speeds of 3
333 times faster than MS1. The GTMS algorithm rapidly
reduces active data points as the iterations increase.
Finally, the ability of the proposed GTMS algorithm can
be incorporated as a part of software working on a small
device for ubiquitous intelligence applications, such as the
segmentation of images containing green vegetation.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Mr James McCloskey for proofreading
the manuscript of this paper.
Funding
This work was partially supported by the Computational Science
Research Group (COSRG), Faculty of Science, Khon Kaen
University (COSRG-SCKKU) and the Higher Education Research
Promotion and National Research University Project of Thailand,
Office of the Higher Education Commission, through the Cluster
of Research to Enhance the Quality of Basic Education.
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Author Biographies
Khamron Sunat is a lecturer at the Department of Computer
Science, Faculty of Science, Khon Kaen University, Thailand.
His main research areas are nature-inspired computing,
ubiquitous-enabled algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
Panida Padungweang is a lecturer at the Department of
Mathematics, Statistic and Computer, Faculty of Science, Ubon
Ratchatani University, Thailand.
Sirapat Chiewchanwattana is a lecturer at the Department of
Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Khon Kaen University,
Thailand. Her main research areas are clever algorithms for deci-
sion support systems, ubiquitous-enabled algorithms, asnd
knowledge management.
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