Image thresholding is one of the fastest and most effective methods of detecting objects in infrared images. This paper proposes an infrared image thresholding method based on the functional approximation of the histogram. The one-dimensional histogram of the image is approximated to the transient response of a first-order linear circuit. The threshold value for the image segmentation is formulated using combinational analogues of standard operators and principles from the concept of the transient behavior of the first-order linear circuit. The proposed method is tested on infrared images gathered from the standard databases and the experimental results are compared with the existing state-of-the-art infrared image thresholding methods. We realized through the experimental results that our method is well suited to perform infrared image thresholding.
Traditional thresholding methods are often used for image segmentation of real images. However, due to distinct characteristics of infrared thermal images, it is difficult to ensure an optimal image segmentation using the traditional thresholding algorithms, and therefore, sometimes this can lead to over-segmentation, missing object information, and/or spurious responses in the output. To overcome these issues, we propose a new thresholding technique that makes use of the sine entropy-based criterion. Moreover, we build a double thresholding technique that makes use of two thresholds to get the final image thresholding result. Besides, we introduce the sine entropy concept as a supplement of the Shannon entropy in creating threshold-dependent criterion derived from the grayscale histogram. We found that the sine entropy is more robust in interpreting the strength of the long-range correlation in the gray levels compared to the Shannon entropy. We have experimented with our method on several infrared thermal images collected from standard image databases to describe the performance. On comparing with the state-of-art methods, the qualitative results from the experiments show that the proposed method achieves the best performance with an average sensitivity of 0.98 and an average misclassification error of 0.01, and second-best performance with an average sensitivity of 0.99 and an average specificity of 0.93.
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