Infrared image segmentation with 2-D maximum entropy method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO)

The 2-D maximum entropy method not only considers the distribution of the gray information, but also takes advantage of the spatial neighbor information with using the 2-D histogram of the image. As a global threshold method, it often gets ideal segmentation results even when the image's signal noise ratio (SNR) is low. However, its time-consuming computation is often an obstacle in real time application systems. In this paper, the image thresholding approach based on the index of entropy maximization of the 2-D grayscale histogram is proposed to deal with infrared image. The threshold vector (t, s), where t is a threshold for pixel intensity and s is another threshold for the local average intensity of pixels, is obtained through a new optimization algorithm, namely, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. PSO algorithm is realized successfully in the process of solving the 2-D maximum entropy problem. The experiments of segmenting the infrared images are illustrated to show that the proposed method can get ideal segmentation result with less computation cost. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.