Particulate matter characterization by gray level co-occurrence matrix based support vector machines.

An efficient and highly reliable automatic selection of optimal segmentation algorithm for characterizing particulate matter is presented in this paper. Support vector machines (SVMs) are used as a new self-regulating classifier trained by gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of the image. This matrix is calculated at various angles and the texture features are evaluated for classifying the images. Results show that the performance of GLCM-based SVMs is drastically improved over the previous histogram-based SVMs. Our proposed GLCM-based approach of training SVM predicts a robust and more accurate segmentation algorithm than the standard histogram technique, as additional information based on the spatial relationship between pixels is incorporated for image classification. Further, the GLCM-based SVM classifiers were more accurate and required less training data when compared to the artificial neural network (ANN) classifiers.