Applications of clustering

Clustering has many applications in different domains, such as biology, business, and information retrieval. A few of them are shown in the following image:

Computer vision and image processing

Clustering techniques are widely used in the computer vision and image processing domain. Clustering is used for image segmentation in medical image processing for computer aided disease (CAD) diagnosis. One specific area is breast cancer detection.

In breast cancer detection, a mammogram is clustered into several parts for further analysis, as shown in the following image. The regions of interest for signs of breast cancer in the mammogram can be identified using the K-Means algorithm, which is explained later in this chapter.

Image features such as pixels, colors, intensity, and texture are used during clustering: