A fuzzy adaptive gravitational search algorithm for two-dimensional multilevel thresholding image segmentation

Two-dimensional (2D) multilevel thresholding is an important technique for noisy image segmentation which has drawn much attention during the past few years. The conventional image segmentation methods are efficient for 2D bi-level thresholding. However, the computational complexity grows exponentially when extended to 2D multilevel thresholding since they search the optimal thresholds by exhaustive strategy. To tackle this problem, a fuzzy adaptive gravitational search algorithm (FAGSA) using Tsallis entropy as its objective function has been presented to find the optimal 2D multilevel thresholds in this paper. In the FAGSA, fuzzy logic controllers are designed to tune the control parameters. The state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms are compared with this proposed algorithm. Both test images and noisy images are utilized in the experiments to evaluate the performance of the involved algorithms. The experimental results significantly demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm in terms of the objective function value, image quality measures and time consumption.