A Novel Method for Multilevel Color Image Segmentation Based on Dragonfly Algorithm and Differential Evolution

Abstract

Multilevel thresholding is a simple and powerful image segmentation method that has received widespread attention in recent years. However, the accuracy and stability of thresholding techniques are still not ideal and cannot meet the needs of engineering problems. Therefore, this paper presents a memetic algorithm of dragonfly algorithm (DA) and differential evolution (DE) for color image segmentation, which is known as improved DA (IDA). On the one hand, DA algorithm has a satisfied capability of avoiding convergence to the local optimum, thus it is served as a global search technique. On the other hand, the DE algorithm is adopted as a local search technique, which can increase the precision of solutions. In this paper, two thresholding techniques, namely, Otsu and minimum cross entropy (MCE) methods are used to determine the optimal threshold values. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we conduct a series of experiments on color images from the Berkeley database and the results are compared with five state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms. Besides, a non-parametric Wilcoxon's rank sum test is also included for statistical analysis. From the experimental results, it is found that IDA-based method outperforms other compared methods in terms of average fitness values, standard deviation, peak signal to noise ratio, structural similarity index, and feature similarity index. The promising results indicate that the application of IDA-based thresholding technique is potential and meaningful.