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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]

• In spite of its interesting results, Mean shift (MS) has a computational cost which is prohibited for several applications. • In this paper, a new competitive segmentation algorithm for grayscale images is introduced. • To reduce the computational cost, MS is operated using a representative set of elements with a very limited number of points. • Once obtained the MS results, they are generalized to include the not involved data. • Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme presents better performance. Multi-feature segmentation has demonstrated its superiority against one-dimensional feature approaches based on only grayscale information. Mean shift (MS) is an algorithm that has been used commonly for multi-feature segmentation. In spite of its interesting results, MS maintains a computational cost that is prohibitive for segmentation scenarios where the feature map consists of multi-dimensional features. In this paper, a new competitive segmentation algorithm for grayscale images is introduced. The proposed approach considers a two-dimensional feature map that includes the grayscale value and the local variance for each pixel in the image. To reduce the computational cost, the Mean shift (MS) algorithm is modified to operate with a very limited number of points from all available data. Under such conditions, two sets of elements are differentiated: involved data (the reduced dataset considered in the MS operation) and not involved data (the rest of the available data). Different from the classical MS, which employs Gaussian functions, in our approach, the process of estimating the feature map is carried out using a more accurate approach such as the Epanechnikov kernel function. Once the MS results are obtained, they are generalized to include the not involved data. Therefore, each unused element is assigned to the same cluster of the closest used data. Finally, clusters with the fewest elements are fused with other neighboring clusters. The proposed segmentation method has been compared with other state-of-art algorithms considering the full number of images from the Berkeley dataset. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme produces segmented images with a 50% better quality of visual perception approximately two times (≈ 1.8 − 2) faster than its competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Color image quantization is a significant procedure of reducing the huge range of color values of a digital color image into a limited range. In this paper, an automated clustering of pixels and color quantization algorithm is proposed. The ideal number of representative colors is unknown beforehand in most color quantization algorithms. This is an important handicap in most practical cases. The proposed color quantization approach (PPCS) is able to automatically estimate an appropriate number of colors in a quantized palette. Hence, PPCS requires no number of representative colors to be set in advance. This algorithm has two main steps to follow: color palette design and pixel mapping. The color palette is generated by the combination of the entire peaks of all color component histograms. Such that, all color component histogram was smoothed in order to remove unreliable peaks. Next, unreliable colors will be removed from the palette. Then, each pixel in the image will be assigned to the cluster (unit color in the palette) which has the least Euclidean distance. To evaluate the ability of the PPCS, 22 images from Berkeley segmentation dataset have been randomly selected and tested with PPCS and also by two well-known quantization algorithms. The numerical evaluations have been carried out by using computation time, PSNR, MSE, and SSIM performance criteria. Both visual and numerical evaluations reveal that the proposed method presents promising quantization results. Such that, PPCS is ranked first, second, first and first according to PSNR, MSE, SSIM and computation time, respectively. [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]

• We present PSCT new data-driven sampling method based clustering algorithms. • PSCT output can be used for image segmentation and image reconstruction. • Image reconstructed with PSCT show similar performance than original images in our tests. In this paper, we describe Pixel Sampling Clustering Technique (PSCT), a data-driven sampling procedure used to reduce pixel sets. We view the pixels in an image as a high redundancy 3D space. We also refer to this space as our color model. Our method aims to retain a relevant sample of the data so it can act as a new smaller, hence more efficient, color model. PSCT uses a pair of fast density-based clustering algorithms in tandem. First, it applies Birch and then DBSCAN to keep the most densely represented colors. We cluster the resulting color model and use the labels to segment images. We also complement the sampling method with a refinement algorithm intended to improve color representation. In our paper, we show how to reconstruct images using our reduced color model. We also show that reconstructed images have enough information to perform image related learning tasks with almost the same accuracy than the original images but with only a small fraction of the data. We test our sampling method in three image related supervised and unsupervised tasks and compare them with state-of-the-art methods. For our experiments, we use two image datasets: MIT's Vision Texture Dataset and Berkeley's BSD500. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superixel is one of the most efficient of the image segmentation approaches that are widely used for different applications. In this paper, we developed an image segmentation based on superpixel and an automatic clustering using q-Generalized Pareto distribution under linear normalization (q-GPDL), called ASCQPHGS. The proposed method uses the superpixel algorithm to segment the given image, then the Density Peaks clustering (DPC) is employed to the results obtained from the superpixel algorithm to produce a decision graph. The Hunger games search (HGS) algorithm is employed as a clustering method to segment the image. The proposed method is evaluated using two different datasets, collected form Berkeley segmentation dataset and benchmark (BSDS500) and standford background dataset (SBD). More so, the proposed method is compared to several methods to verify its performance and efficiency. Overall, the proposed method showed significant performance and it outperformed all compared methods using well-known performance metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]