Image Bi-Level Thresholding Based on Gray Level-Local Variance Histogram

Thresholding is a popular method of image segmentation. Many thresholding methods utilize only the gray level information of pixels in the image, which may lead to poor segmentation performance because the spatial correlation information between pixels is ignored. To improve the performance of thresolding methods, a novel two-dimensional histogram—called gray level-local variance (GLLV) histogram—is proposed in this paper as an entropic thresholding method to segment images with bimodal histograms. The GLLV histogram is constructed by using the gray level information of pixels and its local variance in a neighborhood. Local variance measures the dispersion of gray level distribution of pixels in a neighborhood. If a pixel’s gray level is close to its neighboring pixels, its local variance is small, and vice versa. Therefore, local variance can reflect the spatial information between pixels. The GLLV histogram takes not only the gray level, but also the spatial information into consideration. Experimental results show that an entropic thresholding method based on the GLLV histogram can achieve better segmentation performance.