Infrared image segmentation with 2-D maximum entropy method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO)

The 2-D maximum entropy method not only considers the distribution of the gray information, but also takes advantage of the spatial neighbor information with using the 2-D histogram of the image. As a global threshold method, it often gets ideal segmentation results even when the image's signal noise ratio (SNR) is low. However, its time-consuming computation is often an obstacle in real time application systems. In this paper, the image thresholding approach based on the index of entropy maximization of the 2-D grayscale histogram is proposed to deal with infrared image. The threshold vector (t, s), where t is a threshold for pixel intensity and s is another threshold for the local average intensity of pixels, is obtained through a new optimization algorithm, namely, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. PSO algorithm is realized successfully in the process of solving the 2-D maximum entropy problem. The experiments of segmenting the infrared images are illustrated to show that the proposed method can get ideal segmentation result with less computation cost.