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fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TFUZZ.2017.2756827, IEEE
Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
Double-column manuscript
Symmetry Information Based Fuzzy Clustering
for Infrared Pedestrian Segmentation
Xiangzhi Bai, Yingfan Wang, Haonan Liu and Sheng Guo
 infrared images are also affected by noises and they are always
Abstract—Pedestrian detection in infrared images is always a
challenging task. Segmentation is an important step of pedestrian
detection. An accurate segmentation could provide more
information for further analysis. In this paper, an improved
Fuzzy C-Means clustering method, which incorporates geometric
symmetry information, is proposed for infrared pedestrian
segmentation. In the proposed method, symmetry information is
introduced by Markov Random Field (MRF) theory. Moreover, a
new metric is utilized to handle the weak symmetry of pedestrian.
In addition, a whole procedure is proposed to extract infrared
pedestrians. The experimental results indicate that our method
performs better for infrared pedestrian segmentation and obtains
better segmentation results compared with other state-of-the-art
methods.
Index Terms—Pedestrian segmentation, Infrared images,
Fuzzy C-Means, Symmetry.
I. INTRODUCTION
T he infrared imaging technology is useful in many fields,
especially for pedestrian detection. Pedestrians are usually
warmer than background and appear brighter, which makes
pedestrians possible to be detected. This property would be
helpful for reducing the number of accidents and injury
fatalities, especially in intelligent transportation system at night.
Hence, pedestrian detection is a key technology in automotive
safety, intelligent video surveillance and so on.
Many methods have been proposed for pedestrian detection.
These methods have been proved to be effective to some degree
[1-5]. However, infrared pedestrian detection is still a
challenging task. Pedestrians are non-rigid objects and they
appear with a wide range of clothes, sizes and postures. These
factors make it difficult to fix a template for pedestrians.
Moreover, pedestrians are not the only warm objects in the
environment. Many other objects, such as lamps and vehicles,
could also be captured by infrared cameras. They will disturb
the detection of pedestrians. In addition, pedestrians may
distribute heat heterogeneously. Clothes and other factors may
influence the heat dissipating capacity of the pedestrian, which
results in intensity inhomogeneity in infrared images. Besides,
The authors thank the sponsorship of National Natural Science Foundation
of China (61271023) and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in
Universities (NCET-13-0020). (Corresponding author: Xiangzhi Bai. The first
two authors contributed equally to this paper.).
X. Bai, Y. Wang, H. Liu and S. Guo are with Image Processing Center,
Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 100191 Beijing, China.
(E-mail: jackybxz@buaa.edu.cn).
X. Bai is also with State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and
Systems, Beihang University, 100191 Beijing, China.
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1
low contrast. All of these problems make it difficult to segment
or detect pedestrians in infrared images.
Segmentation is crucial for pedestrian detection. In the
process of segmentation, the regions which may contain
pedestrians should be segmented as the regions of interest (ROI)
for further recognition. An accurate segmentation would
evidently reduce false alarms and provide more details for
further analysis to ensure the precision of recognition. Precision
is an essential requirement in pedestrian detection. Hence,
pedestrian segmentation is an important step of pedestrian
detection.
There are many image segmentation methods. Threshold
segmentation is a widely-used method for image segmentation.
And Otsu method [6] is a famous threshold segmentation
methods. However, Otsu method can not segment the image
correctly when the histogram of the image is unimodal or close
to unimodal. To solve this problem, Unimodal thresholding [7]
was proposed. But this method is mainly used in the unimodal
situation. Minimum error threshold [8] is another classical
threshold method. Images are supposed to obey the Gaussian
distribution in this method, which limits its application.
Marker-based watershed [9] is a morphological algorithm
which imitates the process of topography immersion. But the
problem of accurate foreground object segmentation is still
challenging. Circular Shortest Path (CSP) [10] is a novel
method for infrared pedestrian segmentation and could produce
good results. But the segmentation results of CSP are still not
precise enough. Sometimes this method even fails to segment
the limbs of pedestrians.
Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) is a classical clustering method.
FCM methods do not assign pixels to only one class, but assign
pixels to different classes with different memberships. These
memberships effectively provide the uncertainties for image
segmentation. Thus, FCM and its variants have been widely
used in image segmentation [11-13]. However, not considering
spatial information makes FCM sensitive to noises. To solve
this problem and improve the performance of FCM, some
improved methods [14-19] have been proposed. In these
methods, spatial information is introduced to enhance
robustness of FCM. Effective improvements have been made in
these improved methods, but they still have some problems:
just considering the local information, difficult parameter
selection and ignoring geometric information.
In this paper, to segment infrared pedestrians, an improved
FCM method which incorporates geometric symmetry
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Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
information is proposed. Considering the symmetry feature of
pedestrians, we use symmetry information to improve the
performance of FCM for infrared pedestrian segmentation. A
weight is added to the objective function, in which symmetry
information is introduced by Markov Random Field (MRF)
theory. However, pedestrians are non-rigid objects and the
symmetry is not strict. To overcome this problem, a new
distance metric is utilized to ensure the rationality of symmetry
information. Finally, our method is compared with eight
existing segmentation methods. The experimental results show
that our method performs better for infrared pedestrian
segmentation compared with other segmentation methods.
The rest of this paper is organized as follow: FCM algorithm
and some related works are introduced briefly in section II.
Section III describes our improved FCM method in details and
the whole procedure of infrared pedestrian segmentation is
shown in section IV. Experiment is performed and the
experimental results are analyzed in section V. Some extensive
works are discussed in section VI to analyze the performance of
our method in other application areas.
II. RELATED WORKS
A. Fuzzy C Means (FCM)
FCM algorithm was first proposed by Dunn [20] and was
further generalized by Bezdek [21]. The objective function of
FCM is as below:
N c
J   uijm || x j  vi ||2 .
j 1 i 1
Where X  x1 , x2 , , xN  represents the gray values of
pixels and N is the number of pixels. c is the number of
clusters. uij is the membership of x j belonging to class i and
vi is the clustering center of class i . m is the fuzzy factor,
which is usually set as 2.
Apparently, FCM method does not consider spatial
information of the dataset. Every pixel is considered as isolated.
Therefore FCM method is sensitive to noises.
B. Markov Random Field (MRF) Theory
Assuming that X  x1 , , xN  are random variables in a
dataset and S  1, , N are the sites of these variables. Each
variable takes a label in the set L  1, , c .
MRF theory defines the conception of neighborhood system
N j and it should satisfy these conditions: (1) j  N j ; (2)
j  N r  r  N j . When the dataset X satisfies the following
conditions, it is considered as a Markov Random Field:
P( x j | xS  j )  P( x j | xN j ), P( x j )  0, x j  X .
P ( x j ) represents the probability of the variable on the site of
j taking a value of x j . In image processing, formula (2)
means the label of x j is influenced by its neighbors directly.
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C. Gibbs Fuzzy C Means (GFCM)
To improve the performance of FCM, Gibbs FCM (GFCM)
is proposed in [22]. In GFCM, the neighborhood information is
introduced by Markov Random Field (MRF) theory. The
objective function of GFCM is:
N c
J GFCM   (1  Pj (i ))uijm || x j  vi ||2 . (3)
j 1 i 1
GFCM accomplishes the clustering process by minimizing
the objective function (3). 1  Pj (i ) takes a value between 0
and 1. It is considered as the resistance to assign pixel x j to
class i by its neighborhood N j . 1  Pj (i ) is defined as
refusable level and represents the spatial constraints. It will be
discussed in details in section III.
D. Symmetry Incorporated Fuzzy C Means (SymFCM)
Geometric information is also ignored in FCM. Although
many methods have been proposed to improve the performance
of FCM, they still lack robustness as a result of ignoring
geometric information. To further enhance robustness of FCM,
a modified FCM clustering method SymFCM is proposed [23],
in which symmetry information is incorporated. The objective
function of SymFCM is as below:
N c
J SymFCM   uijm (|| x j  vi ||2  j || x 'j  vi ||2 ). (4)
j 1 i 1
(1) 1
j   ( j   )/ 
(5)
1 e
 
 j  1 || x j  x'j || (6)
x is the mirror pixel of x j and  j is a constant weighing
'
j

the symmetry of x j . x j is the mean value of the pixels in the

neighborhood window with center x j . x'j is the mean value of
the pixels in the neighborhood window with center x 'j . u is the
mean value of  j for all the pixels.  is the standard deviation
of  j for all the pixels. Hence, if the symmetry of x j is strong,
 
x j is close to x'j . Then  j is large and  j  1 . On the
 
contrary, if the symmetry of x j is weak, x j and x'j are
dissimilar. Then  j is small and  j  0 . Therefore, the
contribution of the mirror pixel is determined by the symmetry
of pixel x j .
In this way, symmetry information is introduced into FCM.
However, SymFCM just takes the mirror pixel into
(2)
consideration. Hence, the use of symmetry information is
insufficient.
III. GIBBS SYMMETRY INCORPORATED FCM ALGORITHM
Pedestrians are highlight regions in infrared images. Thus
the pixels belonging to pedestrians present obvious clustering
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Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
property. Moreover, infrared images are always low-contrast
and have blur edges. Usually, there are transitions between the
foreground and background instead of clear boundaries in
infrared images. All these problems above increase the
uncertainty of infrared images. Hence, fuzzy clustering would
be an effective method for infrared pedestrian segmentation.
Infrared images lack texture features and the shape of
infrared pedestrian is nearly symmetric. Therefore, vertical
symmetry is an important feature of infrared pedestrians.
Symmetry information could be introduced into FCM to
improve the performance of infrared pedestrian segmentation.
A. Improvement based on Strict Symmetry Information
The Hamersley–Clifford theorem indicates that a positive
probability distribution can be represented as a Markov
Random Field. Hence, the MRF theory and Gibbs distribution
can be incorporated to describe the relativity between pixel x j
and its neighbors. In GFCM, the calculation of 1  Pj (i ) is
based on MRF theory and Gibbs distribution:
Pj (i)  Z 1 exp(U j (i)).
c along with the relativity between x j and its neighbors. It
Z = exp(U j (i)).
i 1
Where Z is a normalization constant and c is the number
of clusters. U j (i ) is the energy function of pixel x j . It is
defined as below:
U j (i )   V j (i ).
jC
Where C represents the clique which is a subset of sites S .
Every pair of sites in the clique are neighbors. V j (i ) is the
clique potentials and it is determined by the local configuration
on the clique. In GFCM, a special multiple level logic model
[22], which only considers two-sites cliques, is utilized to
calculate the energy function:
U j (i )   (1  ur ,i ).
(10)
r N j
Where N j is the neighborhood of x j . And u r ,i is the
membership of its neighbor xr belonging to class i .
However, this method may produce misclassifications when
the pixel is on the boundary of the target region. To overcome
this problem, spatial shape information is used to revise the
refusable level in [24] and [25]. But this method also neglects
symmetry information.
In infrared images, the shape of infrared pedestrian is nearly
symmetric, which means symmetry is a distinct feature of
infrared pedestrian. There is a great possibility that x j and its
mirror pixel x 'j belong to the same class. Hence, symmetry
information would help to improve the performance of FCM
for infrared pedestrian segmentation.
The refusable level 1  Pj (i ) represents the relativity
between pixel x j and its neighbors. If x j and its neighbors are
highly relevant, the refusable level would be small. This means
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the resistance to assign pixel x j to class i by its neighbors is
small. If the refusable level is large, x j and its neighbors may
be irrelevant. Then, the resistance to assign x j to class i by its
neighbors is large. Hence, the refusable level represents the
relativity between x j and its neighbors. As we have analyzed,
there is a great possibility that pixel x j and its mirror pixel x 'j
are highly relevant. Hence, we can use symmetry information
to redefine the refusable level. The redefined refusable level
Wij represents the relativity between x j and its mirror pixel
x 'j , along with the relativity between x j and its neighbors.
Symmetry information would be helpful for improving the
results of infrared pedestrian segmentation.
So, we define the revised refusable level as below:
Wij  (1  Pj (i))(1  Q j (i)). (11)
The difference between (1  Pj (i )) and Wij is that symmetry
information is used to define the revised refusable level. Wij
(7) represents the relativity between x j and its mirror pixel x 'j ,
(8)
means the resistance to assign pixel x j to class i by its
neighbors and the mirror pixel. If Wij is small, it indicates that
its neighbors and the mirror pixel tend to assign x j to class i .
(9) But if Wij is large, it means its neighbors and the mirror pixel
refuse to assign x j to class i . Hence, Wij represents the spatial
constraints and symmetry constraints of the pixel x j .
The calculation of 1  Pj (i ) is the same to GFCM and a
similar procedure is used to calculate 1  Q j (i) :
Qj (i)  Z 1 exp(E j (i)). (12)
c
Z = exp( E j (i)). (13)
i 1
Following the form of 1  Pj (i ) , E j (i ) should be also a form
of energy function, which is similar to U j (i ) in formula (10).
Symmetry is an important feature of infrared pedestrians, x j
and its mirror pixel x 'j may have similar property. Shape
information and symmetry information should also be
considered in the revised refusable level. Hence, symmetry
information in four directions is utilized to define E j (i ) , as
shown in Fig. 1. Therefore, the difference between E j (i ) and
U j (i ) is that shape information and symmetry information are
considered in E j (i ) . Then, E j (i ) would effectively represents
the relativity between x j and its mirror pixel x j , along with
the relativity between x j and its neighbors. The definition of
E j (i ) is shown in formula (14).
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Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
4

E j (i )  (1  ui ( a, b  1))(1  ui ( a, b  1))(1  ui ( a , b  1))(1  ui ( a , b  1))

4 ' ' ' '

 4 (1  ui ( a  1, b  1))(1  ui ( a  1, b  1))(1  ui ( a  1, b  1))(1  ui ( a  1, b  1))

' ' ' '

(14)
 4 (1  ui ( a  1, b))(1  ui ( a  1, b))(1  ui ( a  1, b ))(1  u ( a  1, b ))
' ' ' '

 4 (1  ui ( a  1, b  1))(1  ui ( a  1, b  1))(1  ui ( a  1, b  1))(1  ui ( a  1, b  1)).

' ' ' '

Fig. 1. The symmetry information of four directions

(a, b) is the coordinate of x j and ( a ' , b ' ) is the coordinate
of the mirror pixel x 'j . ui (a, b) is the membership of x j
belonging to class i . x j and its mirror pixel x 'j are symmetric
with respect to the symmetry axis. Actually, to determine the
mirror pixel of x j , the vertical symmetry axis of the pedestrian
which passes through the middle of the pedestrian is detected
before clustering. The method to detect the vertical symmetry
axis will be discussed in detail in section IV. Z is a
normalization constant.
The revised refusable level would be effective spatial
constraints and geometric symmetry constraints. For pixel x j ,
the revised refusable level Wij represents the resistance to
assign x j to class i by its neighbors and the mirror pixel. The
fourth root is to ensure the revised refusable level keeps the
same order of magnitude with 1  Pj (i ) .
If the first-order derivative of U j (i ) in formula (7) is
Pj (i )
calculated, we will find that  0 . This means 1  Pj (i )
U j (i )
decreases following the decreasing of U j (i ) . Similarly, we can
Q j (i)
infer that  0 . Then 1  Q j (i) decreases following the
E j (i)
decreasing of E j (i ) . Therefore Wij decreases following the
decreasing of 1  Pj (i ) and 1  Q j (i) based on formula (11).
We explain the effectiveness of our revised refusable level
Wij in two situations:
(1). In the first case, the pixel x j is inside the pedestrian. We
define the membership of its neighbors belonging to the
pedestrian as u fore and the membership of its neighbors
belonging to the background as uback , respectively. As x j is
inside the pedestrian, the membership of its neighbors
belonging to the pedestrian is large. This means u fore  uback .
Thus, we can infer that (1  Q fore )  (1  Qback ) based on (12) and
(14). Similarly, (1  Pfore )  (1  Pback ) could be derived based
on (7) and (10). Finally, we can know that W fore  Wback , which
means the revised refusable level decreases the resistance to
assign pixel x j to the class of pedestrian and increases the
resistance to assign pixel x j to the class of background.
Fig. 2. Pixels on the boundary of the pedestrian
(2). In the second case, the pixel x j is on the boundary of the
pedestrian, as shown in Fig. 2. The blue part is inside the
pedestrian, and the white part is outside the pedestrian. We
define the membership of the blue part belonging to the
pedestrian as ubfore and the membership of the blue part
belonging to the background as ubback . As the blue part is inside
the pedestrian, we can infer that ubfore  ubback . The membership
of the white part belonging to the pedestrian is uwfore and the
membership of the white part belonging to the background is
uwback . As the white part is outside the pedestrian, we can infer
that uwfore  uwback . Then, according to formula (14), we can
calculate E fore and Eback :
E fore  4 (1  ubfore )4  3  4 (1  ubfore )2 (1  uwfore )2 . (15)
Eback  4 (1  ubback )4  3  4 (1  ubback )2 (1  uwback )2 . (16)
It is obvious that ubfore and uwback are large while ubback and
uwfore are small. They all range from 0 to 1. In our experiment,
we find that ubback is very close to uwfore and ubfore is very close
to uwback as well. This property holds for almost all the test
images. For example, as shown in Fig. 3, three pixels on the
boundary of the pedestrian are marked by red dots. The average
ubfore , ubback , uwfore and uwback of these three pixels are obtained
from our experiment. The values of these memberships are
ubfore  0.9993, ubback  0.0007, uwfore  0.0002, uwback  0.9998

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Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
5

. We can see that ubback is very close to uwfore and ubfore is very
close to uwback . Therefore, we assume that ubback  uwfore and
ubfore  uwback following [25].
Here the distance measure between x j and center z is the
Euclidean norm. Actually, z is the mean value of X . When
the dataset is free of noise, the mean value is a good estimation
of clustering center. However, once noisy points are mixed, an
obvious deviation of clustering center would produce. Hence,
mean value and the Euclidean distance is not robust. The
clustering center may be affected by the mirror pixels with
weak symmetry. Ideally, the contribution of the pixels with
strong symmetry should be enhanced. The negative effect of
the pixels with weak symmetry should be suppressed. Based on
this idea, we define the followed term.
N

Fig. 3. Pixels on the boundary of the pedestrian  (1  exp( max(|| x

j 1
rN j
'
r  vi ||2 ))). (19)
Moreover, the comparison of experimental results in section V
also proves that our results are closer to the ground truth. This In this paper, the Euclidean norm || x'j  vi ||2 is replaced by
means the pixels on the boundary of the pedestrian are (1  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ))) to handle the weak symmetry of
classified correctly in our experimental results. Hence, our r N j

assumption is reasonable and effective. Then we can infer that pedestrians. Under the new metric, we use the same procedure
E fore  Eback based on this assumption and formulas (15), (16). to minimize formula (19). Then the clustering center vi can be
Therefore, W fore  Wback is obtained according to (11) and (12), expressed as below:
which also means the revised refusable level decreases the N exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ))
vi   N
r N j
resistance to assign pixel x j to the class of pedestrian and x 'j

increases the resistance to assign pixel x j to the class of

j 1

j 1
exp(  max(|| xr  vi || ))
r N j
' 2

(20)
background. N j
By analyzing the two situations above, we prove that the = N
x 'j .
revised refusable level in our method is reasonable. For the
j 1

j 1
j

pixels belonging to pedestrians, the revised refusable level will

decrease the resistance to assign the pixels to the class of
pedestrian. Meanwhile, it will increase the resistance to assign
the pixels to the class of background.
By considering strict symmetry information, the objective
function of improved FCM can be expressed as below:
N c
J  W u (|| x j  vi ||  j || x  vi || ).
m 2 ' 2
ij ij
j 1 i 1
Where N j is the neighborhood of the mirror pixel x 'j .  is
a constant and xr' is the neighbors of the mirror pixel x 'j .
max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ) is the maximum value of || xr  vi || .
' 2
r N j
 j  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 )) is a form of weight. From the
r N j
(17)
definition of  j , we can infer that it is a decreasing function.
j

x is the mirror pixel of x j and  j is a constant weighing

'
j Hence, j increases following the decreasing of
the symmetry of x j . max(|| x  vi || ) under the new metric. Therefore, when the
'
r
2
r N j

symmetry of the mirror pixel is strong, max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ) is

B. Improvement based on Weak Symmetry Information
Pedestrians are non-rigid objects. Hence, they are not strictly
symmetric. For example, the mirror pixel of x j may be outside
the pedestrian, which means the mirror pixel could be seen as
noise point compared with x j .
r N j
small. This means the weight  j is big and the contribution of
the mirror pixel for determining clustering center is big. When
the mirror pixel is outside the pedestrian, the symmetry is weak.
In this case, max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ) is big and the weight  j is small.
r N j

Suppose that X  x1 , x2 xN  is a dataset and z is the This means the contribution of the mirror pixel for determining
clustering center of X . By minimizing the mean square error the clustering center is small. Therefore, the contribution of
N those pixels with strong symmetry is enhanced and the
 || x j  z ||2 , we can obtain a good estimation of z [26]: contribution of those pixels with weak symmetry is suppressed.
j 1
 is defined as the reciprocal of the variance in Alternative
N
FCM method (AFCM) [26]. Actually, the influence of  has
x j

z
j 1
. (18) been analyzed in [26]. If  is very small, the membership of
N AFCM will be very close to FCM membership. And if  is
very large, the AFCM membership performs well for the

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Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
6

characteristic of separation. This means the reciprocal of the N c

variance is a good estimation for  in the metric J GSFCM  Wij uijm (|| x j  vi ||2
j 1 i 1 (23)
(1  exp(  || xr'  vi ||2 )) . In this paper, we redefine  as   j (1  exp(  max(|| x  vi || )))). ' 2
r
r N j
below:
1 S fore The calculation of  has been analyzed and  j is
=  . (21)
 fore S calculated according to formulas (5) and (6). Under the
c
 fore is the variance of pedestrian region and S fore is the constraints uij  [0,1], u i 1
ij  1 , Lagrange multiplier is used to
area of pedestrian region. S is the area of the entire image. To construct a new objective function F to solve the objective
calculate  fore and S fore , FCM is utilized to segment the image function:
N c
in advance and the approximate region of the pedestrian can be
F  Wij uijm (|| x j  vi ||2
identified according to the segmentation result of FCM. We j 1 i 1
treat those pixels, which are assigned to the class of pedestrians (24)
c
in the segmentation result of FCM, as the pedestrian region.   j (1  exp(  max(|| x  vi || ))))   ( uij  1).
'
r
2
r N j
Thus,  fore and S fore can be calculated. i 1

Then we calculate the first derivations with respect to uij , vi ,

As we have used FCM to segment the image in advance and
 fore represents the variance of pedestrian region. 1/  fore is  and set them as 0 :
F
much larger than the reciprocal of the variance of the entire  mWij uijm 1 (|| x j  vi ||2
image. Moreover, infrared pedestrians used in our experiment uij (25)
are not very small. Then S fore / S takes a value between 0 and   j (1  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ))))    0.
r N j
1. Hence, the redefined  is still larger than the reciprocal of
F N
the variance of the entire image. In brief, the redefined  is  Wij uijm (|| x j  vi ||
vi j 1 (26)
also a form of variance and is larger than that of AFCM. Hence,
it is reasonable to infer that the redefined  in the proposed     j || xr'  vi ||  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 )))  0.
rN j
method is more useful than that of AFCM. F c
In addition, it is not difficult to calculate  . We just need to   uij  1  0. (27)
 i 1
calculate the variance and area of pedestrian region before
By solving (25), (26) and (27) simultaneously, we can derive
clustering. And the pedestrian region contains those pixels
the formulas of membership uij and clustering center vi :
which are assigned to the class of pedestrians in the result of
FCM segmentation results. uij 
More relative information of x 'j are taken into consideration 1
by using max(|| x  vi || ) . Moreover, taking the maximum of
'
r
2
Wij (|| x j  vi ||  j (1  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ))))
2
(28)
r N j rN j
c
.
|| xr  vi ||2 can further reduce the weight  j , which means the  W (|| x
1
k 1 ij j  vk ||2  j (1  exp(  max(|| xr'  vk ||2 ))))
negative effects of those pixels with weak symmetry are further r N j

suppressed. vi 
By considering weak symmetry information, the objective N
function of our proposed method can be expressed as below:
N c
W u
j 1
m
ij ij ( x j     j  x 'j  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 )))
r N j (29)
J = uijm (|| x j  vi ||2  j (1  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 )))). (22) N
.
j 1 i 1
rN j
W u
j 1
m
ij ij (1     j  exp(  max(|| x 'j  vi ||2 )))
r N s
xr' is the neighbor of the mirror pixel x 'j and  j is a
Compared with visible images, infrared images have less
constant weighing the symmetry of x j . useful features. But infrared pedestrians are highlight regions.
Thus the symmetry of infrared pedestrian is clearer and more
reliable in infrared images. Especially when the pedestrian is
C. The Final Improved FCM based on Symmetry Information
vertical, it would be almost strictly symmetric in infrared
In this part, we combine the improvements proposed in the images. Hence, symmetry is a reliable feature in infrared
two parts above to improve the performance of FCM. The final images. As we have analyzed above, the proposed method has
objective function of our improved FCM method can be considered the symmetry information flexibly. Therefore, the
expressed as below: proposed method is mainly focused on infrared images.
The robustness of our method is enhanced by introducing
symmetry information. To segment the pedestrians with weak

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Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
Fig. 4. The process of symmetry axis detection
symmetry, a new metric is utilized to replace the Euclidean
distance, which makes our method more effective for infrared
pedestrian segmentation.
IV. THE WHOLE PROCEDURE OF INFRARED PEDESTRIAN
SEGMENTATION
As symmetry information is used in our method, symmetry
axis detection is the first task. To detect the symmetry axis,
Hou’s method [27] is used to generate the saliency map, which
is used to identify the pedestrian regions. Then the pedestrian
regions in the infrared images are processed by FCM.
Afterwards, the sum of the columns of the FCM result is
calculated and a summation curve is generated. Finally, the
locations of the peaks of the curve are considered as the
locations of the symmetry axis. The detection process is shown
in Fig. 4.
After the symmetry axis is obtained, the proposed FCM
method which has been described in details in section III is used
to segment infrared pedestrians. The proposed method is
executed in the following steps:
(1). Initialize the number of clusters c , fuzzy factor m ,
threshold  and the maximum number of iterations T .
(2). Update the revised refusable level Wij .
(3). Update the membership metric U and clustering center
V .
(4). If || J (t  1)  J (t ) ||  , stop; otherwise go to step 2).
Where J represents the value of the objective function and
t is the number of iterations.
The clustering result is a binary image, in which the
background is set as black and the target is set as white. But in
some cases, the clustering results may contain false alarms.
False alarms are the regions which are assigned as pedestrians
but do not contain any pedestrian actually. False alarms are
usually very small or connected to image border, which could
be easily removed if necessary. To remove these false alarms,
those regions which are very small or connected to image
border will be set as background.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The infrared pedestrian dataset used in this paper contains
two image sets with different types of infrared pedestrians and
backgrounds. The first image set contains 339 pedestrians in
186 infrared images. The second image set contains 67
pedestrians in 53 infrared images. And, the backgrounds of the
second image set are more complex compared with the first one.
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7
Moreover, the two image sets are captured at day and night,
respectively. Thus the image sets used in our experiment have
different contrasts and noise levels. The sizes of the two image
sets are 400  700 and 287  384 , respectively. The
experiment is executed under the environment of Intel Core
i5-6500 CPU, 3.20GHz, with 8GB RAM. To prove the
efficiency of our method for infrared pedestrian segmentation,
some widely used algorithms are utilized as comparison
methods, including unimodal thresholding [7], maker based
watershed [9], FCM, AFCM [26], FLICM [11], KIFCM [14],
GQFCM [25] and Circular Shortest Path (CSP) [10]. These
methods are also tested in the same datasets. The experimental
results demonstrate that our method performs better for infrared
pedestrian segmentation compared with these comparison
methods.
A. Parameter Information
Any infrared image utilized in our experiment contains four
parts: sky, street scene, pedestrians and ground. Thus we set the
number of clusters as 4 for FCM clustering methods.
To make it fair, some main parameters used in FCM, AFCM,
FLICM, KIFCM, GQFCM and our proposed method are the
same and they are shown in table I.
TABLE I
PARAMETER INFORMATION
Maximum
Clustering Fuzzy The
Name number
number factor threshold
of iterations
Symbol c m  T
Value 4 2 0.00001 200
The CSP method proposed in [10] has been also used for
infrared pedestrian segmentation and obtained good results.
There is only one parameter in the CSP method, which is the
threshold for saliency and is manually set as 0.25. It has been
analyzed in [10] that 0.25 is an effective value for CSP.
KIFCM method utilized the Gaussian kernel and hesitation
degree to improve the performance of FCM. There are two
parameters:  for calculating the Gaussian kernel and  for
calculating the hesitation degree. In this paper, we use the
“trial-and-error” method to determine the two parameters. We
find that if  and  are too small or too big, KIFCM cannot
segment the infrared pedestrian correctly. Thus we test  from
1 to 200 and  from 0 to 100. Then we calculate the
quantitative measures to identify the best parameters. Finally,
we obtain  =45 and   0.75 in our experiment for
comparison.
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B. Segmentation Result Comparison These comparisons demonstrate that the proposed method
To make a fair comparison, all the segmentation results of performs better for infrared pedestrian segmentation compared
the comparison methods are also processed by the same with the comparison methods.
additional processing steps as our method, which have been C. Quantitative Comparison
described in C part of section III. These additional processing
To further prove the effectiveness of our method, three
steps are helpful for reducing false alarms in the comparison
quantitative measures are utilized for quantitative comparison.
results.
Misclassification error (ME) [28], [29] reflects the ratio of
An example of segmentation results is shown in Fig. 5. We
misclassifications between foreground and background. Hence,
can see that the unimodal method can separate pedestrians from
a lower ME means better segmentation results. The relative
background in some cases. But some parts of pedestrians may
foreground area error (RAE) [30] reflects the accuracy and
lose due to the problem of intensity inhomogeneity. Marker
integrality of the segmented target. Obviously, a lower RAE
based watershed can reduce false alarms and has some
indicates that the segmented result is closer to the ground truth.
improvements. But this method is sensitive to the markers and
F-measure ( F ) [32], [33] is the harmonic mean of precision
fails to separate pedestrians in many cases. FCM can not finish
the task, and many false alarms remained in the segmentation and recall, which fully takes false alarms and missing alarms
results of FCM. Compared with FCM, there is no significant into consideration. A higher F-measure means a more effective
improvement in the results of AFCM, FLICM and KIFCM. method. The definitions of ME, RAE and F-measure are as
False alarms are still remained in the results of these methods. below [10]:
GQFCM segments infrared pedestrians successfully and | B  BS |  | FT  FS |
ME  1  T . (30)
reduces false alarms. However, in the segmentation results of | B T FT |
GQFCM, some parts of trees and street lamps are still remained
 FT  FS
in the results of the first image set. Moreover, some parts of  F if FT  FS
pedestrians may lose and there are many false alarms remained 
RAE  
T
. (31)
in the results of the second image set. The Circular Shortest  FS  FT if F  F
Path can successfully segment pedestrians and remove false  FS S T

alarms. But this method fails to segment the limbs of pedestrian

in some cases, which leads to a partial loss of pedestrians. Our
method can separate pedestrians from background and remove
false alarms effectively. In addition, the limbs of pedestrian are
segmented correctly in our segmentation results. Therefore, the
segmented pedestrians in our results are more accurate.
Fig. 5. An example of segmentation result
More examples of segmentation results and the ground truth
of the pedestrians are shown in Fig. 6, Fig. 7 and Fig. S1 (Fig.
S1 is supplied in the supplementary material). We can see that
false alarms are remained in the segmentation results of FCM,
AFCM, FLICM and KIFCM. Actually, these four methods can
not finish this task. In the results of Unimodal, Watershed and
GQFCM, improvements are made and false alarms are reduced
in some cases. In the results of Circular Shortest Path, false
alarms are removed significantly. But the limbs of pedestrians
are not well segmented in some cases. In the results of our
method, the false alarms are removed and the limbs of
pedestrians are segmented correctly.
(1   )  P  R
F  . (32)
PR
In formulas (30) and (31), BT and FT are the areas of the
background and foreground of the ground truth, respectively.
BS and FS are the areas of the background and foreground of
the segmentation results, respectively.
Suppose that there are PS positive samples and NS
negative samples in a dataset. In the experimental result, there
are TP positive samples which are correctly classified as
positive and there are FN positive samples which are
incorrectly classified as negative. Hence, PS =TP  FN .
Similarly, there are FP negative samples which are
incorrectly classified as positive and there are TN negative
samples which are correctly classified as negative. Hence,
NS =FP  TN . The definitions of P and R are as below:
TP
P= . (33)
TP  FP
TP
R= . (34)
TP  FN
P is precision. It represents the proportion of positive
samples which are correctly classified in the positive result of
the classifier. R is recall. It represents the proportion of
positive samples which are correctly classified in the positive
samples of the whole dataset.  is a constant. Following [32]
and [33], we set   0.5 in our experiment.
The quantitative measures are calculated on the two image
sets. The results of quantitative measures are shown in table II.
From table II, we can see that our method has the lowest ME
and RAE, in the meanwhile, the highest F-measure compared

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Fig. 6. More examples of segmentation results

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Fig. 7. More examples of segmentation results

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TABLE II
THE VALUES OF QUANTITATIVE MEASURES
Our
Unimodal Watershed FCM AFCM FLICM KIFCM GQFCM CSP
method
ME (%) 0.5235 1.1707 2.2672 2.8366 2.2181 2.5236 0.8933 0.2014 0.1400

RAE (%) 47.0864 34.2855 52.5249 61.4967 51.5960 56.8152 36.0871 16.4881 8.6018

Fα (%) 69.0452 85.1308 90.4818 87.1914 91.0669 90.4307 88.6198 92.3489 96.4115

TABLE III
THE COMPARISON RESULT OF AVERAGE TIME
Our
Method Unimodal Watershed FCM AFCM FLICM KIFCM GQFCM CSP
Method
Time (s) 0.3427 1.3524 9.1407 9.8547 102.5202 10.9727 2.3316 1.6881 45.927

TABLE IV
THE COMPARISON RESULT OF TIME COMPLEXITY
Method Unimodal Watershed FCM AFCM FLICM KIFCM GQFCM CSP Our Method

Complexity O( N ) O( N ) O( Nc) O( Nc) O( NcSr ) O( Nc) O( Nc) O( N ) O( Nc log Sr )

Fig. 8. Segmentation of other kinds of images

with other methods. The lowest ME means the pixels which are
incorrectly classified by our method are less than other
comparison methods. The lowest RAE indicates that the
pedestrian target segmented by our method is the closest to the
ground truth among all the methods. Moreover, the highest
F-measure indicates that the segmentation results of our
method are more accurate and holonomic. It also proves that
our method performs better for infrared pedestrian
segmentation compared with other methods.
Hence, the quantitative comparison results also prove that
our method is more effective for infrared pedestrian
segmentation compared with other comparison methods.
D. Computational Comparison
Table III shows the average running time of each method.
All the methods are tested under the same computational
environment of Intel Core i5-6500 CPU, 3.20GHz, with 8GB
RAM and on the same image sets. Table III shows that
unimodal, watershed and CSP method consume less time, as
these methods do not need iterative calculations. The running
time of clustering methods increases compared with the
non-iterative methods. FLICM consumes the most time among
all methods. Our method is faster than FLICM but slower than
other methods. Parallel programming and GPU are effective
ways to reduce the running time, which would be the future
work. However, our method performs very well for infrared
pedestrian segmentation and the performance is better than
other methods. In all, our method is effective for infrared
pedestrian segmentation.
As the computational cost above is also influenced by the
programming style, a further time complexity analysis is
presented in this paper, as shown in table IV. N is the number
of pixels. c is the number of clusters and S r represents the
size of neighborhood N j . Unimodal thresholding, Watershed
and CSP are non-iterative methods. They have the same time
complexity O( N ) . The time complexity of FCM is O( Nc)
[11]. And, it is easy to derive that AFCM, KIFCM and GQFCM
have the same complexity with FCM [11]. A fuzzy factor G
has been added to consider neighborhood information in
FLICM, thus we can infer that the complexity of FLICM should
be O( NcSr ) based on [11]. As shown in formula (23), the
maximum operation is applied on the neighborhood in our

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Fig. 9. Segmentation of noisy infrared pedestrian images

Fig. 10. Visual effect comparison

method and the complexity of the maximum operation is
O(log Sr ) . Thus the time complexity of our method is
O( Nc log Sr ) . Considering log Sr  Sr , the time complexity of
our method is less than FLICM, which is consistent with the
average running time comparison shown in table III.
VI. EXTENSIVE WORKS AND DISCUSSIONS
A. Extension to Other Application Areas
Actually, symmetry is a common feature of objects. There
are many symmetric objects around us, such as buildings,
vehicles, animals, clothes and even human faces. They are all
symmetric to some degrees. Hence, there is no doubt that
symmetry information would be a great help for segmenting
these objects. Thus it is possible to generalize the idea of our
method to other application areas. To prove the possibility of
generalizing the idea of our method to other application areas,
some real-world visible images, infrared ship images and MRI
images are used for further experiment. The segmentation
results are shown in Fig. 8.
In Fig. 8, we can see that the targets are not strictly
symmetric, even asymmetric in vertical direction. But our
method still performs well. In real-world visible images, the
targets are extracted successfully. Similarly, although infrared
ships are not strictly symmetric, they are well segmented by our
method. Hence, our method can also segment other infrared
targets successfully besides infrared pedestrians. Correct
segmentation results of MRI images are obtained as shown in
Fig. 8c), which also proves that our proposed method with
symmetry information could be used for MRI brain image
segmentation. Obviously, our method performs well for the
segmentation of loosely symmetric objects. That is because:
(1). We have analyzed the parameter  j . If the symmetry of
x j is strong,  j  1 . On the contrary, if the symmetry of
x j is weak,  j  0 . This means if the symmetry of the
pixel x j is strong, then the influence of the mirror pixel
will be enhanced. Otherwise, if the symmetry is weak, the
influence of the mirror pixel will be ignored.
(2). As we have discussed in section III, || x'j  vi ||2 is
replaced by (1  exp(  max(|| xr'  vi ||2 ))) in our
r N j
method. The effect of this improvement is that the
contributions of those pixels with strong symmetry are
enhanced and the contributions of those pixels with weak
symmetry are suppressed.
In all, the use of symmetry information in our method is
more flexible and reasonable. Therefore, the applicability of
our method could be generalized, not limited to strictly
symmetric objects or infrared images.
B. The Analysis of Noise Effect
Infrared images are always accompanied by low resolution,
low-contrast and intensity inhomogeneity. These shortcomings
are usually caused by noises in infrared imaging process. In the

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meanwhile, pedestrian is not the only object which is warm in
the environment. Many warm objects can be captured by
infrared camera. These objects are also highlight regions in
infrared images, such as lamps and vehicles. All of these could
be recognized as noises compared with infrared pedestrians.
Thus noise tolerance is a necessary demand for an infrared
pedestrian segmentation method. To analyze the effect of
noises on our method, a further experiment is executed.
To analyze the effect of noises on infrared pedestrian
segmentation, different percentages (standard deviation from
0.05 to 0.2) of Gaussian noises are added in infrared pedestrian
images. Fig. 9 shows an example of infrared pedestrian image
which contains Gaussian noises with mean 0 and standard
deviation 0.2. More segmentation examples of infrared
pedestrian images with different percentages of noises are
shown in Fig. S2 (Fig. S2 is supplied in the supplementary
material). The processed results of our method in Fig. 9 show
that our method can remove the negative effect of noises. The
infrared pedestrian can still be extracted successfully in the
results of our method. Moreover, some other synthetic images
with the same Gaussian noises are also processed by our
method and our method can still obtain correct segmentation
results as shown in Fig. S3 (Fig. S3 is supplied in the
supplementary material). All the experimental results verified
that our method still performs well for noisy infrared pedestrian
images and other noisy synthetic images. Based on the analysis
above, it is reasonable to believe that our method is not very
sensitive to noises and can handle general noisy images.
C. Comparison with Regularization Based FCM Methods
Adding regularization terms into the objective function is
one of the used ways to improve the performance of FCM.
Some improved FCM methods handle the neighborhood
information by adding regularization terms, such as FCM_S
[34], FLICM and the method in [35]. In our method, the
neighborhood information is incorporated by the MRF theory,
which is handled as a form of weight Wij in the objective
function. To prove the efficiency of our method for infrared
pedestrian segmentation, our method is compared with these
three regularization based FCM methods. The segmentation
results are shown in Fig. 10. To be fair for the comparison,
these results are also processed by the same additional
processing steps as our method.
From Fig. 10, we can see that the three regularization based
FCM methods cannot extract the infrared pedestrian
successfully. Moreover, the quantitative comparison is also
executed and the three quantitative measures are calculated.
The comparison result is shown in table V.
As shown in table V, our method still has the lowest ME,
RAE and the highest F-Measure. This means our method is
more effective for infrared pedestrian segmentation compared
with the other three regularization based FCM methods.
Therefore the way to handle the neighborhood information in
our method is reasonable and effective for infrared pedestrian
segmentation.
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TABLE V
QUANTITATIVE COMPARISON
Method Our
FCM_S FLICM
in [35] method
ME (%) 2.5692 2.2181 2.4808 0.1400
RAE (%) 59.4112 51.5960 59.0261 8.6018
Fα (%) 91.4662 91.0669 90.8551 96.4115
Actually, in our method, symmetry information is handled
by adding a term into the objective function, which acts as the
role of regularization term.
In summary, neighborhood information is considered by
changing the fitting terms of the objective function, and
symmetry information is considered by adding term into the
objective function in our method. The symmetry information
acts as the role of regularization term in the objective function
of our method. The most important of all, as we have analyzed
above, the experimental results have indicated that our method
is more effective for infrared pedestrian segmentation
compared with the regularization based FCM methods.
VII. CONCLUSION
Pedestrians are highlight regions in infrared images and they
always present obvious clustering property. The blur edges
result in blur boundaries in infrared images, which would
increase the uncertainty of infrared images. Thus fuzzy
clustering method would be an effective segmentation method
for infrared images. Also infrared images lack texture features,
which means the shape information would be more important in
infrared images. Thus, symmetry is an important feature of
infrared pedestrians. It is reasonable to believe that symmetry
information will be helpful to improve the performance of FCM
for infrared pedestrian segmentation. In our method, symmetry
information is introduced by Markov Random Field theory.
However, pedestrians are non-rigid objects and the vertical
symmetry is weak in some cases. To overcome this problem,
we use a new metric to enhance the contribution of those pixels
with strong symmetry. Finally, our segmentation results are
compared with eight existing segmentation methods from two
aspects: visual effect comparison and quantitative comparison.
We can see that our segmentation results are more accurate and
closer to the ground truth, which means our method is more
effective for infrared pedestrian segmentation compared with
other segmentation methods.
There are many symmetric objects around us, in vertical or
horizontal or a certain direction. Symmetry information would
affect the accuracy of the segmentation. Normally, these
objects are not strictly symmetric. To handle the weak
symmetry of these objects, the symmetry constraints have been
loosened in our method. This improvement makes the proposed
method adapt to the weak symmetry better. Thus the proposed
method would be used in a wide range. In section VI, we have
proved that our method can be generalized to other application
areas and can also obtain correct segmentation results.
Moreover, infrared pedestrian segmentation is the
foundation of infrared pedestrian detection. The performance of
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