Multilevel image thresholding based on 2D histogram and maximum Tsallis entropy--a differential evolution approach.

Multilevel thresholding amounts to segmenting a gray-level image into several distinct regions. This paper presents a 2D histogram based multilevel thresholding approach to improve the separation between objects. Recent studies indicate that the results obtained with 2D histogram oriented approaches are superior to those obtained with 1D histogram based techniques in the context of bi-level thresholding. Here, a method to incorporate 2D histogram related information for generalized multilevel thresholding is proposed using the maximum Tsallis entropy. Differential evolution (DE), a simple yet efficient evolutionary algorithm of current interest, is employed to improve the computational efficiency of the proposed method. The performance of DE is investigated extensively through comparison with other well-known nature inspired global optimization techniques such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, artificial bee colony, and simulated annealing. In addition, the outcome of the proposed method is evaluated using a well known benchmark--the Berkley segmentation data set (BSDS300) with 300 distinct images.