Improved Glowworm Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Multilevel Color Image Thresholding Problem

Abstract EN

The thresholding process finds the proper threshold values by optimizing a criterion, which can be considered as a constrained optimization problem.

The computation time of traditional thresholding techniques will increase dramatically for multilevel thresholding.

To greatly overcome this problem, swarm intelligence algorithm is widely used to search optimal thresholds.

In this paper, an improved glowworm swarm optimization (IGSO) algorithm has been presented to find the optimal multilevel thresholds of color image based on the between-class variance and minimum cross entropy (MCE).

The proposed methods are examined on standard set of color test images by using various numbers of threshold values.

The results are then compared with those of basic glowworm swarm optimization, adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO), and self-adaptive differential evolution (SaDE).

The simulation results show that the proposed method can find the optimal thresholds accurately and efficiently and is an effective multilevel thresholding method for color image segmentation.