An efficient krill herd algorithm for color image multilevel thresholding segmentation problem

Abstract

The conventional thresholding methods are very efficient for bi-level thresholding, but the computational complexity may be excessively high for color image multilevel thresholding. Color image multilevel thresholding segmentation can be considered as a constrained optimization problem, therefore swarm intelligence algorithms are widely used to reduce the complexity. In this paper, an efficient krill herd (EKH) algorithm is proposed to search optimal thresholding values at different level for color images and the Otsu’s method, Kapur’s entropy and Tsallis entropy are employed as objective functions. Seven different algorithms, KH without any genetic operators (KH I), KH with crossover operator (KH II), KH with crossover and mutation operators (KH IV), modified firefly algorithm (MFA), modified grasshopper optimization algorithm (MGOA), bat algorithm (BA) and water cycle algorithm (WCA), are compared with the EKH algorithm. Experiments are performed on ten color benchmark images in terms of optimal threshold values, objective values, PSNR, SSIM and standard deviation of the objective values at different levels. The experimental results show that the presented EKH algorithm is superior to the other algorithms for color image multilevel thresholding segmentation. On the other hand, Kapur’s entropy is found to be more accurate and robust for color image multilevel thresholding segmentation.