An Expanded Histogram Approach for Multilevel Image Thresholding
MK Quweider
CIS Department, University of Texas, Brownsville
Brownsville, Texas 78520, USA
Mahmoud.quweider@utb.edu
Abstract
In this paper a new image thresholding technique is
proposed based on expanding the histogram of the image to
accommodate spatial-related information in the form of a
variance map of every gray level present in the image. The
expanded histogram along with the variance levels are fed
into a thresholding finding algorithm based on partitioning
the interval (histogram) in an optimal way using dynamic
programming with an entropy-based cost function.
Compared with many existing methods, simulations on a
range of images show good results. The effectiveness of the
algorithm is shown even in the presence of low to moderate
additive Gaussian noise levels.
1. Introduction
Thresholdinng is common and popular technique for image
segmentation. Its popularity stems from its intuitive
interpretation, simplicity, ease of implementation, and low
computational cost. The technique has found numerous
applications in computer vision, image processing,
automatic inspection, and medical imaging diagnosis,
among many others.
Many of the thresholding techniques produced over the past
fifty years are reviewed in the literature [1-4]. Most of these
techniques try either to optimize an objective function, or to
have a desired property among the pixels of a common
region. Among these methods, the histogram based, entropy
based, and error minimization based methods are the most
common ones [1-7]. To enhance the performance of image
thresholding, many authors try to incorporate information
related to the spatial adjacency or proximity of pixels to
each others. Such measures enhance global thresholding by
using local information to classify neighboring pixels or
pixels with a common property as belonging to the same
region or object. This information is most useful when
dealing with images that have varying object to background
ratios or when dealing with textured regions.
In this paper, we propose a new approach to image
thresholding by creating an expanded 1-D histogram that
incorporates local information in the form of local variance
of pixels of a given intensity or gray level value. The
expanded histogram creates a set of four pseudo gray levels
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for each given gray level based on a measure of local
activity. The formed histogram is then passed to an optimal
partitioning on an interval algorithm that uses a cost
function for its partitioning. For our cost function we define
a new entropy-based cost function that incorporates the
variance of pixels with respect to their neighbors. We
introduce the expanded histogram and the cost function
models in section 2; section 3 presents the algorithm in
detail. Section 4 presents image simulation results along
with a comparative study with many current and popular
methods. Conclusion and future work are given in section
5.
2. Image thresholding model
2.1 Expanded histogram generation
expands
to 4 new
original
levels
Each
level
gray
Figure 1. Original and expanded histogram
As shown in figure 1, the original histogram of the image is
firs generate and then expanded into a one-dimensional
histogram with 4-times the original size. Each gray level,
with its corresponding count, is broken into four gray
levels. The original count of the gray level, say l, gets
distributed into the new gray levels (4*l, 4*l +1, 4*l +2, 4*l
+3) based on a 2-dimensional variance image σ2(i,j). The
variance image is created based on the 8-connected
neighbors of a central pixel at (i,j). The 3x3neighborhood is
shown in figure 2. The 4-times expansion factor is based on
experimental results and a compromise between
performance and computational complexity. Other factors
can be used as well. For example, we can double the size of
the original histogram, or we can devise an adaptive
expansion mechanism of a gray level based on the total
variance associated with that level as decided by the
variance image. The expanded histogram is then used to
find the threshold value of interest. For this, we elected to
109
use a newly introduced optimal partitioning algorithm,
described in [7] that intelligently searches the space of the
histogram to find the threshold in an optimal way as we
describe in the next section.
2.2 Optimal partitioning on an interval
We can pose the problem of finding the optimal threshold
within the histogram as a problem of optimal partitioning of
the histogram, denoted here as R, into a set of two uniform
regions R0 and R1 such that:
∪R
i = 0 ,1
i = R and R0 ∩ R1 = φ , using an appropriate cost
function. The optimal partitioning algorithm should find
this threshold based on the cost function. A partition here is
defined as a set of one or more contiguous gray levels
(block) from the histogram that are similar with respect to
the cost function. A cost function, C(Ri), is associated with
each region or partition with the overall cost over the
histogram R denoted as C(R) being the sum of the costs of
the partitions. This can be expressed as follows:
M −1
C ( R) = ∑ C ( Ri )
i =0
Jackson, Scargle and others [7-12], have recently developed
a dynamic programming technique that solves this problem
in O (L2) where L is the length of the histogram to be
partitioned. Associated with each partition is a cost
function. The algorithm searches the exponentially large
space of partitions of L data points in time O (L2). The cost
function required by the algorithm must be additive with
the cost of the total signal being the sum of the costs of its
subintervals or partitions. The algorithm is guaranteed to
find the exact global optimum, automatically determines the
model order (the number of thresholds) and has a
convenient real-time mode. The algorithm is discussed in
detail in the references and we only give a summary of it
within the context of our edge detection model:
Step 0: Decide the cost function C
Step 1: Set optimal (-1) =0; set n=0
Step 2: Given optimal (j) for j=0, 1, …, n
• Compute optimal (n+1) as given in [7], for j=0,
1,…, n+1
• Keep track of j, where maximum occurred as
lastChange(n+1)
• Set n = n+1
• If n=L Stop
Step 3: Extract the threshold location as:
Th = Th 0 = lastChange ( L −1 )
As we can see from the third step, the threshold location is
traced back in reverse order. The change point is essentially
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the threshold that will divide the image into object and
background as dictated by the cost function, which is
discussed next.
2.3 Cost function
In this paper, we redefine the histogram-based entropy to
incorporate spatial information about the image in the form
of a measure that reflects the activity of each gray level. To
do this, we use the following measure for entropy
SpatialEnt ropy = SE ( H ) =
l = L −1
∑− p l log( p l / m l ) (2)
l =0
In the above equation, ml is a busyness or activity
weighting factor. The inclusion of this factor allows for
inclusion of spatial information and makes thresholding less
dependent on the size of objects or background present in
the image. Several approaches can be used to define this
factor; in this paper, we define ml as a measure that uses a
local neighborhood around a central pixel as shown in
figure 2.
(1)
Figure 2. 3x3 neighborhood for variance definition
One important observation for our thresholding problem is
the fact that the cost function has the desired property of
depending only on the sum of all the gray levels present in
an interval and the number of cells in that interval which is
called sufficient statistic.
3. Algorithm
Based on the new expanded histogram model, dynamic
partitioning of an interval and the choice of the entropy-
based cost function, we introduce the thresholding
algorithm as given in figure 3. The algorithm created the
original histogram and the 2-D variance image in the
preprocessing stage. The expanded histogram is created
with information from the variance image. The entropy cost
function is defined based on the expanded histogram. The
two objects are used as inputs for the optimal partitioning,
which produced the optimal threshold value. This value is
then used to quantize the original image into two levels as
follows:
110
 ⎧ q0 0 ≤ I(i,j) < T0
Q 2 (i , j ) = ⎨
⎩ 1 0 I(i,j) < 4 L − 1
q T ≤
Note that the output (two-level) image uses the expanded
gray levels to create the binary image. Some of these gray
levels will split as object and background even though they
have come from the same original gray level l.
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0 50
Figure 3. Complete algorithm flow diagram
Following are the general steps for the algorithm
1. Create the original histogram and the variance image.
2. Generate the expanded histogram with each gray level
splitting to four gray levels according to the variance
image.
3. Feed the expanded histogram with the entropy cost
function to the optimal partitioning dynamic
programming algorithm
4. The produced change point is treated as the threshold
value.
5. Produce thresholded image using the expanded gray
levels.
Since the original optimal partitioning algorithm is
designed to produce many change points (thresholds), we
have used a third parameter called the prior to force only
one threshold value. The prior, as was originally designed,
implicitly determines the number of classes that we feel an
image has a priori. Large values give smaller number of
threshold for the output image. Generally, having an
adjustable prior is very good to have since it allows the
optimal partitioning algorithm to be flexibly used for multi-
level thresholding and quantization application as we did in
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[10-11]. Deciding the prior is usually done in ad hoc
(3)
fashion depending on the application at hand.
4. Simulation results
In this section, and due to space limitation, we present the
thresholding results only for the case of two quantization
levels (i.e. binarization). In testing the effectiveness of our
algorithm, we have obtained excellent results for images of
low and high details. The results of testing our algorithm on
the Lena image and the F-16 images are shown in figure 4.
We have also compared our algorithm with five popular
and current techniques [1-3] as shown in figure 6. Close
inspection of the resulting images show that our algorithm
does a good job in reproducing most of the details around
the edges. Our algorithm has shown robustness to different
100 150 200 250
levels and types of noise as well. Figure 5 (a-c) shows a
corrupted Lena image with Gaussian noise of zero mean
and standard deviation of 10, 20, and 40 respectively; the
output images are shown in parts (d-f). Again, in evaluating
the images subjectively, we can see that the algorithm
succeeds in producing an acceptable binary version of the
image under both levels of noise. Some of the noise
artifacts can easily be eliminated using post processing
operations including morphological and point ones. The
complexity of the algorithm is O ((4L)2) and is similar to
that presented in [11] with two additions: the expansion of
the histogram by factor 4; and the cincorporation of the
spatial information through the spatially-based cost
function.
5. Conclusion
We presented a new thresholding algorithm based on
dynamically partitioning an expanded version of the image
histogram. The algorithm incorporates the image spatial
information when generating the expanded histogram and
in creating an entropy-based cost function that has a local
variance weighting factor. Experimental results show that
the produced thresholded images are very good, especially
when compared with many current existing methods. The
algorithm is also robust under low to moderate levels of
additive Gaussian noise (and is expected to do produce
similar results under other noise types such as the salt and
pepper one). We are currently working on some related
issues such as applying the algorithm to multi-level
thresholding techniques, and to other cost functions that can
incorporate spatial information of the image. An exhaustive
study of the overall computational complexity of the
algorithm is also under way.
6. References
111
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[3]. M. Sezgin and B. Sankur, “Survey over image thresholding
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[10]. J. Scargle and M.K. Quweider, “Edge Detection Using
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[11]. M.K. Quweider, J.D. Scargle and B. Jackson, “Grey level
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[12]. R. Bellman, Dynamic Programming, Princeton, University
Press, Princeton, 1957.

a. Original Lena b. Original F-16

c. Thresholded Lena d. Thresholded F-16

Figure 4. (a)-(b) Original images. (c)-(d) Results of thresholding using described method

a b c

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 d e f

Figure 5. (a)-(c) Original Lena image corrupted by noise of 10, 20, and 40 standard deviation respectively. (d)- (f)
Thresholded Lena Image with a 3x3 Gaussian smoothing preprocessing step.

Original Image

a. Otsu method b. Kittler and Illingworth c. Reddi et al.

d. Kapur et al. e. Papamarkos et al. f. Quweider

Figure 6. (a) Original Lena Image. (b)-(f) Results of thresholding the image using the indicated method.

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