Optimal thresholding for color images

Mehmet Celenk; Maarten Uijt de Haag

doi:10.1117/12.304605

6 April 1998 Optimal thresholding for color images

Mehmet Celenk, Maarten Uijt de Haag

Proceedings Volume 3304, Nonlinear Image Processing IX; (1998) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.304605
Event: Photonics West '98 Electronic Imaging, 1998, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

Color image thresholding is a special case of color clustering which is commonly used for tasks such as object detection, region segmentation, enhancement, and target tracking. As compared to the three-dimensional (3-D) color clustering, thresholding is computationally more efficient for computer implementation and pipelined hardware realization. Traditionally, this method operates on a particular color component whose distribution possesses more prominent peaks than the other two color histograms. In this operation, it is expected that the histogram peaks represent meaningful object areas. However, the color component thresholding results are less reliable than those of 3-D clustering because the valuable information in the other two color components are ignored in region acceptance process. To improve the performance of thresholding, we describe a method that thresholds an input image three times on three different color components independently. The best thresholds are selected by optimizing the within-group variance or directed divergence measure for red, green, and blue distributions separately. The resultant three binary images are combined by means of a predicate logic function that makes use of a 3-input, 1-output majority logic gate. This enables 1-D thresholding mechanism to incorporate the information on all the color components in region acceptance process.

Citation Download Citation

Mehmet Celenk and Maarten Uijt de Haag "Optimal thresholding for color images", Proc. SPIE 3304, Nonlinear Image Processing IX, (6 April 1998); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.304605

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