Alternative Thresholding Technique for Image Segmentation Based on Cuckoo Search and Generalized Gaussians

Object segmentation is a widely studied topic in digital image processing, as to it can be used for countless applications in several fields. This process is traditionally achieved by computing an optimal threshold from the image intensity histogram. Several algorithms have been proposed to find this threshold based on different statistical principles. However, the results generated via these algorithms contradict one another due to the many variables that can disturb an image. An accepted strategy to achieve the optimal histogram threshold, to distinguish between the object and the background, is to estimate two data distributions and find their intersection. This work proposes a strategy based on the Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) and the Generalized Gaussian (GG) distribution to assess the optimal threshold. To test this methodology, we carried out several experiments in synthetic and practical scenarios and compared our results against other well-known algorithms from the literature. These practical cases comprise a medical image database and our own generated database. The results in a simulated environment show an evident advantage of the proposed strategy against other algorithms. In a real environment, this ranks among the best algorithms, making it a reliable alternative.