Efficient multilevel image segmentation through fuzzy entropy maximization and graph cut optimization

• Iterative scheme for accelerating fuzzy c-partition (c>2) entropy calculation.
• Evaluation of different optimization techniques for maximizing fuzzy entropy.
• Enforcing local spatial coherence in global threshold-based segmentation approaches.
• Outperform existing algorithms in terms of both result quality and processing speed.

The fuzzy c-partition entropy has been widely adopted as a global optimization technique for finding the optimized thresholds for multilevel image segmentation. However, it involves expensive computation as the number of thresholds increases and often yields noisy segmentation results since spatial coherence is not enforced. In this paper, an iterative calculation scheme is presented for reducing redundant computations in entropy evaluation. The efficiency of threshold selection is further improved through utilizing the artificial bee colony algorithm as the optimization technique. Finally, instead of performing thresholding for each pixel independently, the presented algorithm oversegments the input image into small regions and uses the probabilities of fuzzy events to define the costs of different label assignments for each region. The final segmentation results is computed using graph cut, which produces smooth segmentation results. The experimental results demonstrate the presented iterative calculation scheme can greatly reduce the running time and keep it stable as the number of required thresholds increases. Quantitative evaluations over 20 classic images also show that the presented algorithm outperforms existing multilevel segmentation approaches.