A novel edge-based criterion for determining the number of thresholds for multilevel image thresholding

摘要

In order to determine the appropriate number of thresholds that a grey-level image should be thresholded by so thatthe resulting image preserves as much information as possible from the original image using the least possible bits, wepropose in this paper, a novel criterion for multilevel image thresholding. The criterion is a weighted sum of within-classvariance and the number of edge pixels in the thresholded image. To determine the appropriate number of thresholds, animage has to be thresholded iteratively with increasing number of thresholds by any standard thresholding method andthe solution that minimizes the proposed criterion is chosen as the appropriate solution. We also present an efficienttechnique to compute the number of edge pixels. Experiments on a variety of real-world images show that the proposedcriterion gives visually more consistent results compared to the most widely used automatic thresholding criterionproposed by Yen et al. (1995).© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.