A new image segmentation technique using bi-entropy function minimization.

Image segmentation, the splitting of a multispectral and panchromatic image into groups of homogeneous pixels based on the region of interest(ROI), is a universal step for many advanced image processing and object recognition. Image segmentation essentially affects the overall performance of any automated image analysis system due to utmost importance of its quality. Image segmentation can be performed by recursively splitting the whole image or by merging together a large number of minute regions until a specified condition is satisfied. Thresholding is an old, simple and important method in gray scale image segmentation. In this paper, we have used Shannon’s entropy and proposed a new multilevel thresholding image segmentation method based on minimization of bi-entropy function. A smoothing technique based on weight value of the pixel within a w × w moving window is introduced to make the splitting result continuous and qualitative. The proposed algorithm takes full account of the spatial information and the gray information to decrease the computing quantity. Standard medical images, texture images, and remote sensing images are segmented in the experiment and compared with other related segmentation methods with different measures. Experimental results show that the proposed method can quickly converge with high computational efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]