Fuzzy thresholding of color images using Dempster-Shafer theory

This paper is concerned with the development of a novel color image thresholding technique using fuzzy thresholding and Dempster-Shafer's theory based fusion. The color bands of a given image are fuzzified by means of a fuzzy thresholding technique which uses an S-shape membership function and a linear index of fuzziness based fuzzy measure. The resulting fuzzy maps are used to determine the mass functions of the hypotheses representing the classes for each pixel. These hypotheses are then combined using the orthogonal sum rule of the Dempster-Shafer theory to compute the final threshold map. The results show that the proposed algorithm yields a superior performance to its counterpart methods which are based on crisp and fuzzy techniques.