Normally the objective of image segmentation is to reduce N dimension of data space such as hybrid color to two dimension where each point in 2 dimension space has only one color value instead of N values. SOMs is one way of reducing N dimesion color space.
K. Mahantesh, V. N. Manjunath Aradh, S. K. Niranjan,
An Impact of Complex Hybrid Color Space in Image Segmentation, the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing Springer book series (AISC, volume 235) , pp 73-82