Multi-level thresholding based on differential evolution and Tsallis Fuzzy entropy

Abstract

This paper presents a multilevel image thresholding approach which relies on Tsallis entropy using Fuzzy partition with a novel threshold selection technique. In order to compute the optimal threshold values, Differential Evolution (DE) has been employed. The proposed method can further be exploited in image segmentation which is considered to be a critical step in image processing. Our proposed threshold selection technique is based on Tsallis-Fuzzy entropy and the results are compared with Shannon entropy (or fuzzy entropy) and Tsallis entropy based existing threshold selection techniques. The experiments are performed on two different sets of images and the results have been compared with that of existing state-of-the-art methods, namely, Patch Levy Bees' Algorithm (PLBA), Bacterial Foraging optimization (BFO), modified Bacterial Foraging optimization (MBFO) and Bees' Algorithm (BA). Quantitative analysis is carried out based on three image quality metrics viz SSIM, PSNR and SNR. Standard deviation and CPU time for convergence of the objective function have been calculated for performance evaluation. Furthermore, the statistical significance of our method has been estimated using Friedman test and Wilcoxon test. The experimental results manifest that our method produces results superior to the methods in comparison.