Abstract
We propose a new approach to tackle the well known fuzzy c-means (FCM) initialization problem. Our approach uses a metaheuristic search method called Harmony Search (HS) algorithm to produce near-optimal initial cluster centers for the FCM algorithm. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a MRI segmentation problem. In order to dramatically reduce the computation time to find near-optimal cluster centers, we use an alternate representation of the search space. Our experiments indicate encouraging results in producing stable clustering for the given problem as compared to using an FCM with randomly initialized cluster centers.