A Comparison of Nature Inspired Algorithms for Multi-threshold Image Segmentation

In the field of image analysis, segmentation is one of the most important preprocessing steps. One way to achieve segmentation is by mean of threshold selection, where each pixel that belongs to a determined class islabeled according to the selected threshold, giving as a result pixel groups that share visual characteristics in the image. Several methods have been proposed in order to solve threshold selectionproblems; in this work, it is used the method based on the mixture of Gaussian functions to approximate the 1D histogram of a gray level image and whose parameters are calculated using three nature inspired algorithms (Particle Swarm Optimization, Artificial Bee Colony Optimization and Differential Evolution). Each Gaussian function approximates thehistogram, representing a pixel class and therefore a threshold point. Experimental results are shown, comparing in quantitative and qualitative fashion as well as the main advantages and drawbacks of each algorithm, applied to multi-threshold problem.Comment: 16 pages, this is a draft of the final version of the article sent to the Journa

Hybrid Whale-Mud-Ring Optimization for Precise Color Skin Cancer Image Segmentation

Timely identification and treatment of rapidly progressing skin cancers can significantly contribute to the preservation of patients' health and well-being. Dermoscopy, a dependable and accessible tool, plays a pivotal role in the initial stages of skin cancer detection. Consequently, the effective processing of digital dermoscopy images holds significant importance in elevating the accuracy of skin cancer diagnoses. Multilevel thresholding is a key tool in medical imaging that extracts objects within the image to facilitate its analysis. In this paper, an enhanced version of the Mud Ring Algorithm hybridized with the Whale Optimization Algorithm, named WMRA, is proposed. The proposed approach utilizes bubble-net attack and mud ring strategy to overcome stagnation in local optima and obtain optimal thresholds. The experimental results show that WMRA is powerful against a cluster of recent methods in terms of fitness, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Square Error (MSE)

Cooperative Swarm Intelligence Algorithms for Adaptive Multilevel Thresholding Segmentation of COVID-19 CT-Scan Images

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is widespread throughout the world and poses a serious threat to public health and safety. A COVID-19 infection can be recognized using computed tomography (CT) scans. To enhance the categorization, some image segmentation techniques are presented to extract regions of interest from COVID-19 CT images. Multi-level thresholding (MLT) is one of the simplest and most effective image segmentation approaches, especially for grayscale images like CT scan images. Traditional image segmentation methods use histogram approaches; however, these approaches encounter some limitations. Now, swarm intelligence inspired meta-heuristic algorithms have been applied to resolve MLT, deemed an NP-hard optimization task. Despite the advantages of using meta-heuristics to solve global optimization tasks, each approach has its own drawbacks. However, the common flaw for most meta-heuristic algorithms is that they are unable to maintain the diversity of their population during the search, which means they might not always converge to the global optimum. This study proposes a cooperative swarm intelligence-based MLT image segmentation approach that hybridizes the advantages of parallel meta-heuristics and MLT for developing an efficient image segmentation method for COVID-19 CT images. An efficient cooperative model-based meta-heuristic called the CPGH is developed based on three practical algorithms: particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), and Harris hawks optimization (HHO). In the cooperative model, the applied algorithms are executed concurrently, and a number of potential solutions are moved across their populations through a procedure called migration after a set number of generations. The CPGH model can solve the image segmentation problem using MLT image segmentation. The proposed CPGH is evaluated using three objective functions, cross-entropy, Otsu’s, and Tsallis, over the COVID-19 CT images selected from open-sourced datasets. Various evaluation metrics covering peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and universal quality image index (UQI) were employed to quantify the segmentation quality. The overall ranking results of the segmentation quality metrics indicate that the performance of the proposed CPGH is better than conventional PSO, GWO, and HHO algorithms and other state-of-the-art methods for MLT image segmentation. On the tested COVID-19 CT images, the CPGH offered an average PSNR of 24.8062, SSIM of 0.8818, and UQI of 0.9097 using 20 thresholds

A multilevel image thresholding based on Hybrid Salp Swarm algorithm and Fuzzy Entropy

The image segmentation techniques based on multi-level threshold value received lot of attention in recent years. It is because they can be used as a pre-processing step in complex image processing applications. The main problem in identifying the suitable threshold values occurs when classical image segmentation methods are employed. The swarm intelligence (SI) technique is used to improve multi-level threshold image (MTI) segmentation performance. SI technique simulates the social behaviors of swarm ecosystem, such as the behavior exhibited by different birds, animals etc. Based on SI techniques, we developed an alternative MTI segmentation method by using a modified version of the salp swarm algorithm (SSA). The modified algorithm improves the performance of various operators of the moth-flame optimization (MFO) algorithm to address the limitations of traditional SSA algorithm. This results in improved performance of SSA algorithm. In addition, the fuzzy entropy is used as objective function to determine the quality of the solutions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, we evaluated our techniques on CEC2005 benchmark and Berkeley dataset. Our evaluation results demonstrate that SSAMFO outperforms traditional SSA and MFO algorithms, in terms of PSNR, SSIM and fitness value

Image multi-level-thresholding with Mayfly optimization

Image thresholding is a well approved pre-processing methodology and enhancing the image information based on a chosen threshold is always preferred. This research implements the mayfly optimization algorithm (MOA) based image multi-level-thresholding on a class of benchmark images of dimension 512x512x1. The MOA is a novel methodology with the algorithm phases, such as; i) Initialization, ii) Exploration with male-mayfly (MM), iii) Exploration with female-mayfly (FM), iv) Offspring generation and, v) Termination. This algorithm implements a strict two-step search procedure, in which every Mayfly is forced to attain the global best solution. The proposed research considers the threshold value from 2 to 5 and the superiority of the result is confirmed by computing the essential Image quality measures (IQM). The performance of MOA is also compared and validated against the other procedures, such as particle-swarm-optimization (PSO), bacterial foraging optimization(BFO), firefly-algorithm(FA), bat algorithm (BA), cuckoo search(CS) and moth-flame optimization (MFO) and the attained p-value of Wilcoxon rank test confirmed the superiority of the MOA compared with other algorithms considered in this wor

Optimization Methods for Image Thresholding: A review

Setting a border with the proper gray level in processing images to separate objects from their backgrounds is crucial. One of the simplest and most popular methods of segmenting pictures is histogram-based thresholding. Thresholding is a common technique for image segmentation because of its simplicity. Thresholding is used to separate the Background of the image from the Foreground. There are many methods of thresholding. This paper aims to review many previous studies and mention the types of thresholding. It includes two types: the global and local thresholding methods and each type include a group of methods. The global thresholding method includes (the Otsu method, Kapur's entropy method, Tsallis entropy method, Hysteresis method, and Fuzzy entropy method), and the local thresholding method includes ( Ni-Black method and Bernsen method). The optimization algorithms(Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Bat Algorithm, Modified Grasshopper Optimization, Firefly Algorithm, Cuckoo Search, Tabu Search Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, and Jaya Algorithm) used along with thresholding methods are also illustrated