Multilevel Thresholding Selection Based on Chaotic Multi-Verse Optimization for Image Segmentation

Multilevel thresholding is the most important method for image processing. Conventional multilevel thresholding methods have proven to be efficient in bi-level thresholding; however, when extended to multilevel thresholding, they prove to be computationally more costly, as they comprehensively search the optimal thresholds for the objective function. This paper presents a chaotic multi-verse optimizer (CMVO) algorithm using Kapur's objective function in order to determine the optimal multilevel thresholds for image segmentation. The proposed CMVO algorithm was applied to various standard test images, and evaluated by peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM). The CMVO algorithm efficiently and accurately searched multilevel thresholds and reduced the required computational times.