MAXIMUM SEGMENTED IMAGE-INFORMATION THRESHOLDING

Utilizing information theory and considering image segmentation from a communication perspective, the image segmentation process is interpre ted as a data processing step that operates on a gray-scale image and produces a segmented image. It is shown that the segmented image conta ins a certain amount of information about the scene, which is defined as segmented image information (SII), It is proposed that the SII shou ld be maximized when an image is thresholded, and this is known as the maximum segmented image information (MSII) thresholding criterion. Th e MSII thresholding criterion possesses better properties as compared with the minimum error (MINE) and the uniform error (UNFE) thresholdin g criteria, Based on the MSII thresholding criterion, an MSII threshol ding algorithm is proposed for the thresholding of real images. The MS II thresholding algorithm is evaluated against several well-known thre sholding algorithms, The good thresholding results of both synthetic a nd real images confirm the capabilities of the proposed MSII threshold ing algorithm. (C) 1998 Academic Press.