Two-dimensional Otsu's thresholding segmentation method based on grid box filter

Otsu algorithm, an automatic thresholding method, is widely used in classic image segmentation applications. In this paper, a novel two-dimensional (2D) Otsu thresholding algorithm based on local grid box filter is proposed. In our method, firstly by utilizing the coarse-to-fine idea, the 2D histogram is divided into regions by grid technique, and each region is used as a point to form a new 2D histogram, to which 2D Otsu thresholding algorithm and an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm are applied to get the region number of the new 2D histogram threshold. Then on the result region, the mean of the 2D histogram is computed base on box filter, and the two algorithms are applied again to obtain the final threshold for the original image. Experimental results on real data show that the proposed algorithm gets better segmentation results than the traditional recursion Otsu algorithm. It significantly reduces the time of segmentation process and simultaneously has the higher segmentation accuracy. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.