For data analyses, it is very important to combine data with similar attribute values into a categorically homogeneous subset, called a cluster, and this technique is called clustering. Generally crisp clustering algorithms are weak in noise, because each datum should be assigned to exactly one cluster. In order to solve the problem, a fuzzy c-means, a fuzzy maximum likelihood estimation, and an optimal fuzzy clustering algorithms in the fuzzy set theory have been proposed. They, however, require a lot of processing time because of exhaustive iteration with an amount of data and their memberships. Especially large memory space results in the degradation of performance in real-time processing applications, because it takes too much time to swap between the main memory and the secondary memory. To overcome these limitations, an extended fuzzy clustering algorithm based on an unsupervised optimal fuzzy clustering algorithm is proposed in this paper. This algorithm assigns a weight factor to each distinct datum considering its occurrence rate. Also, the proposed extended fuzzy clustering algorithm considers the degree of importances of each attribute, which determines the characteristics of the data. The worst case is that the whole data has an uniformly normal distribution, which means the importance of all attributes are the same. The proposed extended fuzzy clustering algorithm has better performance than the unsupervised optimal fuzzy clustering algorithm in terms of memory space and execution time in most cases. For simulation the proposed algorithm is applied to color image segmentation. Also automatic target detection and multipeak detection are considered as applications. These schemes can be applied to any other fuzzy clustering algorithms.
