Multi-level image thresholding by synergetic differential evolution

•We have applied an improved optimization technique SDE, which is improved version of basic differential evolution (DE)•We have investigated the performance of SDE taking two criteria; Gaussian approximation and entropy.

The multi-level image thresholding is often treated as a problem of optimization. Typically, finding the parameters of these problems leads to a nonlinear optimization problem, for which obtaining the solution is computationally expensive and time-consuming. In this paper a new multi-level image thresholding technique using synergetic differential evolution (SDE), an advanced version of differential evolution (DE), is proposed. SDE is a fusion of three algorithmic concepts proposed in modified versions of DE. It utilizes two criteria (1) entropy and (2) approximation of normalized histogram of an image by a mixture of Gaussian distribution to find the optimal thresholds. The experimental results show that SDE can make optimal thresholding applicable in case of multi-level thresholding and the performance is better than some other multi-level thresholding methods.

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