Multilevel image thresholding using elephant herding optimization algorithm

Abstract

Digital images are widely used and numerous application in different scientific fields use digital image processing algorithms where image segmentation is a common task. Thresholding represents one technique for solving that task and Kapur's and Otsu's methods are well known criteria often used for selecting thresholds. Finding optimal threshold values represents a hard optimization problem and swarm intelligence algorithms have been successfully used for solving such problems. In this paper we adjusted recent elephant herding optimization algorithm for multilevel thresholding by Kapur's and Otsu's method. Performance was tested on standard benchmark images and compared with four other swarm intelligence algorithms. Elephant herding optimization algorithm outperformed other approaches from literature and it was more robust.