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The minimum cross-entropy (MCIT) is introduced as a multi-level image thresholding approach, but it suffers from time complexity, in particular, when the number of thresholds is high. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel MCIT-based image thresholding based on improved human mental search (HMS) algorithm, a recently proposed population-based metaheuristic algorithm to tackle complex optimisation problems. To further enhance the efficacy, we improve HMS algorithm, IHMSMLIT, with four improvements, including, adaptively selection of the number of mental searches instead of randomly selection, proposing one-step k-means clustering for region clustering, updating based on global and personal experiences, and proposing a random clustering strategy. To assess our proposed algorithm, we conduct an extensive set of experiments with several state-of-the-art and the most recent approaches on a benchmark set of images and in terms of several criteria including objective function, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), feature similarity index (FSIM), structural similarity index (SSIM), and stability analysis. The obtained results apparently demonstrate the competitive performance of our proposed algorithm.