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PurposeImage segmentation is one of the most essential tasks in image processing applications. It is a valuable tool in many oriented applications such as health-care systems, pattern recognition, traffic control, surveillance systems, etc. However, an accurate segmentation is a critical task since finding a correct model that fits a different type of image processing application is a persistent problem. This paper develops a novel segmentation model that aims to be a unified model using any kind of image processing application. The proposed precise and parallel segmentation model (PPSM) combines the three benchmark distribution thresholding techniques to estimate an optimum threshold value that leads to optimum extraction of the segmented region: Gaussian, lognormal and gamma distributions. Moreover, a parallel boosting algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the developed segmentation algorithm and minimize its computational cost. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed PPSM, different benchmark data sets for image segmentation are used such as Planet Hunters 2 (PH2), the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC), Microsoft Research in Cambridge (MSRC), the Berkley Segmentation Benchmark Data set (BSDS) and Common Objects in COntext (COCO). The obtained results indicate the efficacy of the proposed model in achieving high accuracy with significant processing time reduction compared to other segmentation models and using different types and fields of benchmarking data sets.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed PPSM combines the three benchmark distribution thresholding techniques to estimate an optimum threshold value that leads to optimum extraction of the segmented region: Gaussian, lognormal and gamma distributions.FindingsOn the basis of the achieved results, it can be observed that the proposed PPSM–minimum cross-entropy thresholding (PPSM–MCET)-based segmentation model is a robust, accurate and highly consistent method with high-performance ability.Originality/valueA novel hybrid segmentation model is constructed exploiting a combination of Gaussian, gamma and lognormal distributions using MCET. Moreover, and to provide an accurate and high-performance thresholding with minimum computational cost, the proposed PPSM uses a parallel processing method to minimize the computational effort in MCET computing. The proposed model might be used as a valuable tool in many oriented applications such as health-care systems, pattern recognition, traffic control, surveillance systems, etc.

The proliferation of cloud computing relied on the virtualization of the compute and storage resources and provisioning them dynamically according to users' needs on a pay-per-use model. Massive cloud providers have geo-distributed cloud data centers to ensure service reliability, availability and satisfy user's need. Therefore, cloud management systems are necessary to increase the profit of cloud providers and to improve the quality-of service demanded by users. This paper focuses on an energyefficient method to solve the problem of allocating data-intensive workloads in geographically distributed data centers. The workload's tasks are characterized by large data transfer times than their execution times. The problem formulated as a nonlinear programming optimization problem. Then, to find an optimal solution to the problem, meta-heuristic genetic algorithm is proposed. The designed heuristic takes into account the cost of the data transfer time from the storage location to the compute servers as well as the workload makespan on the available hosts. Extensive simulations using the CloudSim simulator are conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed allocation method and how it performs with respect to other methods in the literature. Our results show significant enhancements in energy consumption while respecting the user's QoS.