The MR image segmentation is always a challenging problem because of the intensity inhomogeneity. Many existing methods don't reach their expected segmentations; besides their implementations are usually complicated. Therefore, we originally interleave the extended Otsu segmentation with bias field estimation in an energy minimization. Via our proposed method, the optimal segmentation and bias field estimation are achieved simultaneously throughout the reciprocal iteration. The results of our method not only satisfy the required classification via its applications in the synthetic and the real images, but also demonstrate that our method is superior to the baseline methods in accordance with the performance analysis of JS metrics.

k-NN classification has been applied to classify normal tissues in MR images. However, the intensity inhomogeneity of MR images forces conventional k-NN classification into significant misclassification errors. This letter proposes a new interleaved method, which combines k-NN classification and bias field estimation in an energy minimization framework, to simultaneously overcome the limitation of misclassifications in conventional k-NN classification and correct the bias field of observed images. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm.