A new image segmentation method based on multifractal detrended moving average analysis

•A novel image segmentation method is proposed.•Two rapeseed images of nutritional deficiency are used to test our method.•The proposed method is superior to the other two multifractal segmentation methods.•Some meaningful conclusions are obtained.

In order to segment and delineate some regions of interest in an image, we propose a novel algorithm based on the multifractal detrended moving average analysis (MF-DMA). In this method, the generalized Hurst exponent h(q)h(q) is calculated for every pixel firstly and considered as the local feature of a surface. And then a multifractal detrended moving average spectrum (MF-DMS) D(h(q))D(h(q)) is defined by the idea of box-counting dimension method. Therefore, we call the new image segmentation method MF-DMS-based algorithm. The performance of the MF-DMS-based method is tested by two image segmentation experiments of rapeseed leaf image of potassium deficiency and magnesium deficiency under three cases, namely, backward (θ=0θ=0), centered (θ=0.5θ=0.5) and forward (θ=1θ=1) with different qq values. The comparison experiments are conducted between the MF-DMS method and other two multifractal segmentation methods, namely, the popular MFS-based and latest MF-DFS-based methods. The results show that our MF-DMS-based method is superior to the latter two methods. The best segmentation result for the rapeseed leaf image of potassium deficiency and magnesium deficiency is from the same parameter combination of θ=0.5θ=0.5 and D(h(−10))D(h(−10)) when using the MF-DMS-based method. An interesting finding is that the D(h(−10))D(h(−10)) outperforms other parameters for both the MF-DMS-based method with centered case and MF-DFS-based algorithms. By comparing the multifractal nature between nutrient deficiency and non-nutrient deficiency areas determined by the segmentation results, an important finding is that the gray value’s fluctuation in nutrient deficiency area is much severer than that in non-nutrient deficiency area.