A non-revisiting quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization based multilevel thresholding for image segmentation

Multilevel thresholding for image segmentation is one of the crucial techniques in image processing. Even though numerous methods have been proposed in literature, it is still a challenge for the existing methods to produce steady satisfactory thresholds at manageable computational cost in segmenting images with various unknown properties. In this paper, a non-revisiting quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (NrQPSO) algorithm is proposed to find the optimal multilevel thresholds for gray-level images. The proposed NrQPSO uses the non-revisiting scheme to avoid the re-evaluation of the evaluated solution candidates. To reduce the unnecessary computation cost, the NrQPSO provides an automatic stopping mechanism which is capable of gauging the progress of exploration and stops the algorithm rationally in a natural manner. For further improving the computation efficiency, the NrQPSO employs a meticulous solution search method to overcome the drawback of the existing QPSO algorithms using the original search methods. Performance of the NrQPSO is tested on the Berkeley segmentation data set. The experimental results have demonstrated that the NrQPSO can outperform the other state-of-the-art population-based thresholding methods in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and robustness; thus, the NrQPSO can be applied in real-time massive image processing.