An automatic multilevel image thresholding using relative entropy and meta-heuristic algorithms (Q742752)

Summary: Multilevel thresholding has been long considered as one of the most popular techniques for image segmentation. Multilevel thresholding outputs a gray scale image in which more details from the original picture can be kept, while binary thresholding can only analyze the image in two colors, usually black and white. However, two major existing problems with the multilevel thresholding technique are: it is a time consuming approach, i.e., finding appropriate threshold values could take an exceptionally long computation time; and defining a proper number of thresholds or levels that will keep most of the relevant details from the original image is a difficult task. In this study a new evaluation function based on the Kullback-Leibler information distance, also known as relative entropy, is proposed. The property of this new function can help determine the number of thresholds automatically. To offset the expensive computational effort by traditional exhaustive search methods, this study establishes a procedure that combines the relative entropy and meta-heuristics. From the experiments performed in this study, the proposed procedure not only provides good segmentation results when compared with a well known technique such as Otsu's method, but also constitutes a very efficient approach.