A Quick Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Image Thresholding

The computational complexity grows exponentially for multi-level thresholding (MT) with the increase of the number of thresholds. Taking Kapur’s entropy as the optimized objective function, the paper puts forward the modified quick artificial bee colony algorithm (MQABC), which employs a new distance strategy for neighborhood searches. The experimental results show that MQABC can search out the optimal thresholds efficiently, precisely, and speedily, and the thresholds are very close to the results examined by exhaustive searches. In comparison to the EMO (Electro-Magnetism optimization), which is based on Kapur’s entropy, the classical ABC algorithm, and MDGWO (modified discrete grey wolf optimizer) respectively, the experimental results demonstrate that MQABC has exciting advantages over the latter three in terms of the running time in image thesholding, while maintaining the efficient segmentation quality.