Hybrid Algorithm of Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization and Grey Wolf Optimization for Optimum Cluster Analysis Applicable for Facial Skin Segmentation

Facial skin segmentation plays an important role in applications such as identification, facial expression analysis, facial animation, and skin disease analysis. Clustering is one of the most common methods for image segmentation. In this paper, a new hybrid method based on Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization and Grey Wolf Optimization is presented to optimize the performance of the K-Means clustering. By Combination of two algorithms, the exploitation performance of the QPSO algorithm is improved by the exploration capability of the GWO algorithm. To measure the similarity, four distance criteria including Euclidean, Minkowski,  Mahalanobis, and City-Block distances have been used to optimize the K-Means algorithm. The proposed method has a better performance in segmentation and convergence speed compared to other meta-heuristic algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm, GWO, PSO, QPSO, Bat Optimization, Crow Search Algorithm. The experimental results show that Minkowski distance has a better performance in calculating similarity and optimization of K-Means algorithm. Based on the obtained results, the proposed method ensures the achievement of the optimal solution and prevents the problem from falling to a local minimum.