In order to solve the problem of the negative effects of shading and uneven illuminations in the color image on segmentation

this paper proposes a novel algorithm for color image segmentation based on vector quantization and region growing.The algorithm takes into account both color information and spatial information of color images

which avoids the insufficiency of previous methods which have considered either the color information of the image

or the spatial information of the image.Firstly

the color image is quantized by using a modified generalized Lloyd algorithm(GLA)

and then selects seed pixels in terms of the quantization results of color images.Secondly

from each seed pixel region growing is performed based on the vector angle similarity criterion.Finally

fuzzy C-means(FCM) algorithm is used to classify the remaining pixels which have not been classified into regions being formed earlier.The experiments show that the negative effects of shading and uneven illuminations in the color image on segmentation can be overcome to a great extent by using the proposed algorithm.Color image segmentation results of the proposed approach hold favorable consistency in terms of human visual perception.