A Novel Hybrid Harris Hawks Optimization for Color Image Multilevel Thresholding Segmentation

Multilevel thresholding has got more attention in recent years with various successful applications. However, the implementation becomes more and more complex and time-consuming when the number of thresholds is high, and color images which contain more information are even worse. Therefore, this paper proposes an alternative hybrid algorithm for color image segmentation, the advantages of which lie in extracting the best features from the high performance of two algorithms and overcoming the limitations of each algorithm to some extent. Two techniques, Otsu's method, and Kapur's entropy, are used as fitness function to determine the segmentation threshold values. Harris hawks optimization (HHO) is a novel and general-purpose algorithm, and the hybridization of HHO is fulfilled by adding another powerful algorithm-differential evolution (DE), which is known as HHO-DE. More specifically, the whole population is divided into two equal subpopulations which will be assigned to HHO and DE algorithms, respectively. Then both algorithms operate in parallel to update the positions of each subpopulation during the iterative process. In order to fully demonstrate the superior performance of HHO-DE, the proposed method is compared with the seven state-of-the-art algorithms by an array of experiments on ten benchmark images. Meanwhile, five measures, including the average fitness values, standard deviation (STD), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structure similarity index (SSIM), and feature similarity index (FSIM), are used to evaluate the performance of each algorithm. In addition, Wilcoxon's rank sum test for statistical analysis and the comparison with the super-pixel method are also conducted to verify the superiority of HHO-DE. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method significantly outperforms other algorithms. Hence, the HHO-DE algorithm is a remarkable and promising tool for multilevel thresholding color image segmentation.