Multilevel thresholding using a modified ant lion optimizer with opposition-based learning for color image segmentation

Multilevel thresholding has important research value in image segmentation and can effectively solve region analysis problems of complex images. In this paper, Otsu and Kapur's entropy are adopted among thresholding segmentation methods. They are used as the objective functions. When the number of threshold increases, the time complexity increases exponentially. In order to overcome this drawback, a modified ant lion optimizer algorithm based on opposition-based learning (MALO) is proposed to determine the optimum threshold values by the maximization of the objective functions. By introducing the opposition-based learning strategy, the search accuracy and convergence performance are increased. In addition to IEEE CEC 2017 benchmark functions validation, 11 state-of-the-art algorithms are selected for comparison. A series of experiments are conducted to evaluate the segmentation performance of the algorithm. The evaluation metrics include: fitness value, peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index, feature similarity index, and computational time. The experimental data are analyzed and discussed in details. The experimental results significantly demonstrate that the proposed method is superior over others, which can be considered as a powerful and efficient thresholding technique.