Battle royale optimizer for multi-level image thresholding

Abstract

Segmentation is an essential step of image processing that directly affects its success. Among the methods used for image segmentation, histogram-based thresholding is prevalent. Two well-known approaches to histogram-based thresholding are Otsu’s and Kapur’s methods in grey images that maximize the between-class variance and the entropy measure, respectively. Both techniques were introduced for bi-level thresholding. However, these techniques can be expanded to multilevel image thresholding. For this to occur, a large number of iterations are required to account for exact threshold values. To this end, various optimization techniques have been used to overcome this drawback. Recently, a new optimization algorithm called Battle Royal Optimizer (BRO) has been published, which is shown to solve various optimization tasks effectively. In this study, BRO has been applied to yield optimum threshold values in multilevel image thresholding. Here is also demonstrated the effectiveness of BRO for image segmentation on various images from the standard publicly accessible Berkeley segmentation dataset. We compare the performance of BRO to other state-of-the-art optimization-based methods and show that it outperforms them in terms of fitness value, Peak-Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index Method (SSIM), Feature Similarity Index Method (FSIM), Color FSIM (FSIMc) and Standard Deviation (SD). The results of the proposed technique suggest that BRO is a promising approach for solving image segmentation tasks.