Unified formulation of a class of image thresholding techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we show that Otsu's image thresholding, Kittler and Illingworth's minimum error thresholding, and Huang and Wang's fuzzy thresholding methods can be derived under a similar mathematical formulation. The difference among the three methods is the choice of different weighting functions for computing a criterion function that can be considered as a weighted summation of the image gray level histogram. We can have a better understanding of the three thresholding techniques and derive other thresholding methods based on this unified formulation.