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Multilevel thresholding segmentation of color images plays an important role in many fields. The pivotal procedure of this technique is determining the specific threshold of the images. In this paper, an improved mayfly algorithm (IMA)-based color image segmentation method is proposed. Tent mapping initializes the female mayfly population to increase population diversity. Lévy flight is introduced in the wedding dance iterative formulation to make IMA jump from the local optimal solution quickly. Two nonlinear coefficients were designed to speed up the convergence of the algorithm. To better verify the effectiveness, eight benchmark functions are used to test the performance of IMA. The average fitness value, standard deviation, and Wilcoxon rank sum test are used as evaluation metrics. The results show that IMA outperforms the comparison algorithm in terms of search accuracy. Furthermore, Kapur entropy is used as the fitness function of IMA to determine the segmentation threshold. 10 Berkeley images are segmented. The best fitness value, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and other indexes are used to evaluate the effect of segmented images. The results show that the IMA segmentation method improves the segmentation accuracy of color images and obtains higher quality segmented images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilevel thresholding for image segmentation is one of the crucial techniques in image processing. Even though numerous methods have been proposed in literature, it is still a challenge for the existing methods to produce steady satisfactory thresholds at manageable computational cost in segmenting images with various unknown properties. In this paper, a non-revisiting quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (NrQPSO) algorithm is proposed to find the optimal multilevel thresholds for gray-level images. The proposed NrQPSO uses the non-revisiting scheme to avoid the re-evaluation of the evaluated solution candidates. To reduce the unnecessary computation cost, the NrQPSO provides an automatic stopping mechanism which is capable of gauging the progress of exploration and stops the algorithm rationally in a natural manner. For further improving the computation efficiency, the NrQPSO employs a meticulous solution search method to overcome the drawback of the existing QPSO algorithms using the original search methods. Performance of the NrQPSO is tested on the Berkeley segmentation data set. The experimental results have demonstrated that the NrQPSO can outperform the other state-of-the-art population-based thresholding methods in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and robustness; thus, the NrQPSO can be applied in real-time massive image processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]