Image Thresholding Using TRIBES, a Parameter-Free Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Finding the optimal threshold(s) for an image with a multimodal histogram is described in classical literature as a problem of fitting a sum of Gaussians to the histogram. The fitting problem has been shown experimentally to be a nonlinear minimization problem with local minima. In this paper, we propose to reduce the complexity of the method, by using a parameter-free particle swarm optimization algorithm, called TRIBES which avoids the initialization problem. It was proved efficient to solve nonlinear and continuous optimization problems. This algorithm is used as a "black-box" system and does not need any fitting, thus inducing time gain.