Robust color image multi-thresholding using between-class variance and cuckoo search algorithm

Abstract

Multi-level image thresholding is a well known pre-processing procedure, commonly used in variety of image related domains. Segmentation process classifies the pixels of the image into various group based on the threshold level and intensity value. In this paper, colour image segmentation is proposed using Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm. The performance of the proposed technique is validated with the Bacterial Forage Optimization (BFO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The qualitative and quantitative investigation is carried out using the parameters, such as CPU time, between-class variance value and image quality measures, such as Mean Structural Similarity Index Matrix (MSSIM), Normalized Absolute Error (NAE), Structural Content (SC) and PSNR. The robustness of the implemented segmentation procedure is also verified using the image dataset smeared with the Gaussian Noise (GN) and Speckle Noise (SN). The study shows that, CS algorithm based multi-level segmentation offers better result compared with BFO and PSO.