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To overcome the shortcomings of 1-D and 2-D Otsu’s thresholding methods, a 3-D Otsu method has been introduced. While yielding satisfactory segmentation results for images with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and poor contrast, it has the downside of high computational complexity. In this paper, the cuttlefish algorithm (CFA)-based 3-D Otsu thresholding method is proposed to pace up the conventional 3-D Otsu thresholding for color image segmentation. In order to decrease the effects of noises and weak edges, an optimally selected multilevel 3-D Otsu image thresholding technique is brought into the proposed segmentation scheme. The CFA is a newly developed stochastic meta-heuristic optimization algorithm based on observing, mimicking, and modeling the camouflaging feature of cuttlefish. It is used to simplify the problem of exhaustive search for the optimal threshold vector in 3-D space. Experimental results, when compared to 1-D Otsu, 1-D Otsu-Cuckoo search (CS) algorithm, 1-D Otsu-lightning search algorithm (LSA), 1-D Otsu-CFA, conventional 3-D Otsu, 3-D Otsu-CS, and 3-D Otsu-LSA, indicate that the proposed algorithm CFA-based 3-D Otsu thresholding is superior to all the other multilevel thresholding algorithms. The proposed 3-D-CFA method produces promising segmentation results from the objective and subjective aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]