SegGBC: Justifiable Coarse-to-Fine Granular-Ball Computing for Enhancing Clustering Image Segmentation

As an emerging multi-granularity clustering paradigm, granular-ball computing (GBC) hierarchically represents samples through granular-balls (GBs) to capture compact, multi-scale features. Nevertheless, its effective application to clustering-based segmentation methods (CSMs) remains challenging due to two key issues: representing intrinsic uncertainties and defining a justifiable, semantics-aware quality criterion. To address them, the first segmentation framework based on GBC (SegGBC) is proposed to alleviate the single‑granularity limitation of existing CSMs. Concretely, we leverage intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) to explicitly quantify image uncertainty: membership and non‑membership encode evidence, and the IFS hesitation degree models residual ambiguity. In addition, a semantic compactness metric criterion (SCM_GB) is designed to characterize semantic information by considering the ''stable region'' in conjunction with the overall density of GBs. The proposal of ''stable region'' ensures robust semantics concurrently with high computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SegGBC achieves promising performance for segmentation. The proposed segmentation GB representation is a plug-and-play front-end, significantly boosting the performance of CSMs by >+3.25\% SA and >+3.92\% mIoU on standard image and COCO benchmarks. Code is available at supplementary material.