A multilevel color image thresholding scheme based on minimum cross entropy and differential evolution

• A new multi-level thresholding approach is proposed for color images.
• The minimum cross-entropy approach is extended to color images.
• Simple evolutionary search is used to solve the underlying optimization problem.
• The proposed method is validated by using the Berkley Segmentation Datasets.

We propose a novel multi-level thresholding method for unsupervised separation between objects and background from a natural color image using the concept of the minimum cross entropy (MCE). MCE based thresholding techniques are widely popular for segmenting grayscale images. Color image segmentation is still a challenging field as it involves 3-D histogram unlike the 1-D histogram of grayscale images. Effectiveness of entropy based multi-level thresholding for color image is yet to be explored and this paper presents a humble contribution in this context. We have used differential evolution (DE), a simple yet efficient evolutionary algorithm of current interest, to improve the computation time and robustness of the proposed algorithm. The performance of DE is also investigated extensively through comparison with other well-known nature inspired global optimization techniques like genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and artificial bee colony (ABC). The proposed method is evaluated by comparing it with seven other prominent algorithms both qualitatively and quantitatively using a well known benchmark suite – the Barkley Segmentation Dataset (BSDS300) with 300 distinct images. Such comparison reflects the efficiency of our algorithm