Median-based image thresholding

  • Authors:
  • Jing-Hao Xue;D. Michael Titterington

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Statistical Science, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

  • Venue:
  • Image and Vision Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In order to select an optimal threshold for image thresholding that is relatively robust to the presence of skew and heavy-tailed class-conditional distributions, we propose two median-based approaches: one is an extension of Otsu's method and the other is an extension of Kittler and Illingworth's minimum error thresholding. We provide theoretical interpretation of the new approaches, based on mixtures of Laplace distributions. The two extensions preserve the methodological simplicity and computational efficiency of their original methods, and in general can achieve more robust performance when the data for either class is skew and heavy-tailed. We also discuss some limitations of the new approaches.