We investigate the stability of iteratively thresholding images that c
ontain spec noise distributed according to the Gamma distribution. Our
analysis is first order perturbation and we supplement it with experi
mentation in order to identify for which ranges of parameter values th
at characterise the problem, the iterative scheme will converge to the
optimal solution according to the Bayesian theory. (C) 1998 Pattern R
ecognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese
rved.