New quantum inspired meta-heuristic techniques for multi-level colour image thresholding

The efficient meta-heuristic techniques, called ant colony optimization, differential evolution and particle swarm optimization, inspired by the fundamental features of quantum systems, are presented in this paper. The proposed techniques are Quantum Inspired Ant Colony Optimization, Quantum Inspired Differential Evolution and Quantum Inspired Particle Swarm Optimization for Multi-level Colour Image Thresholding. These techniques find optimal threshold values at different levels of thresholding for colour images. A minimum cross entropy based thresholding method, called Li's method is employed as an objective (fitness) function for this purpose. The efficiency of the proposed techniques is exhibited computationally and visually on ten real life true colour images. Experiments with the composite DE (CoDE) method, the backtracking search optimization algorithm (BSA), the classical ant colony optimization (ACO), the classical differential evolution (DE) and the classical particle swarm optimization (PSO), have also been conducted subsequently along with the proposed techniques. Experimental results are described in terms of the best threshold value, fitness measure and the computational time (in seconds) for each technique at various levels. Thereafter, the accuracy and stability of the proposed techniques are established by computing the mean and standard deviation of fitness values for each technique. Moreover, the quality of thresholding for each technique is determined by computing the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values at different levels. Afterwards, the statistical superiority of the proposed techniques is proved by incorporating Friedman test (statistical test) among different techniques. Finally, convergence curves for different techniques are presented for all test images to show the visual representation of results, which proves that the proposed Quantum Inspired Ant Colony Optimization technique outperforms all the other techniques.

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