A Multilevel Image Thresholding Approach Based on Crow Search Algorithm and Otsu Method

Abstract

Image segmentation is one of the fundamental problems in the image processing, which identifies the objects and other structures in the image. One of the widely used methods for image segmentation is image thresholding that can separate pixels based on the specified thresholds. Otsu method calculates the thresholds to divide two or multiple classes based on between-class variance maximization and within-class variance minimization. However, increasing the number of thresholds, surging the computational time of the segmentation. To combat this drawback, the combination of Otsu and the evolutionary algorithm is usually beneficial. Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) is a novel, and efficient swarm-based metaheuristic algorithm that inspired from the way crows storing and retrieving food. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid method based on employing CSA and Otsu for multilevel thresholding. The obtained results compared with the combination of the Otsu method with three other evolutionary algorithms consisting of improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Firefly Algorithm (FA), and also the fuzzy version of FA. Our evaluation on the five benchmark images shows competitive/improved results both in time and uniformity.