Adaptive multilevel thresholding based on multiobjective artificial bee colony optimization for noisy image segmentation

Abstract

Multilevel thresholding is one of the effective image segmentation methods. However, it faces three big challenges: (1) how to adaptively determine the number of multiple thresholds; (2) how to overcome the sensitivity to image noise; (3) how to perform multilevel thresholding under several segmentation requirements. In order to solve these problems, an adaptive multilevel thresholding algorithm based on multiobjective artificial bee colony optimization (AMT-MABCO) segmentation is presented for noisy image in this paper. To improve the robustness of AMT-MABCO to image noise, a line intercept histogram which considers both the intensity and coordinate information in the neighborhood of the pixels is firstly utilized to define a novel between-class variance function as one fitness function. Then, an interval-valued fuzzy entropy function is constructed as another fitness function to deal with the blurred characteristic in images. AMT-MABCO tries to obtain a compromising multilevel thresholding result under these two segmentation requirements. To adaptively determine the number of thresholds, a grouping population initialization and evaluation strategies are proposed in AMT-MABCO. Furthermore, two novel search equations are constructed in AMT-MABCO to generate candidate solutions in the employed bees and onlookers phases, respectively. Experimental results show that AMT-MABCO outperforms state-of-the-art thresholding methods in noise robustness and segmentation performance.