• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.5 s.311
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• pp.29-37
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• 2006

Thresholding is a fundamental approach to segmentation that utilizes a significant degree of pixel popularity or intensity. Otsu's thresholding employed the normalized histogram as a discrete probability density function. Also it utilized a criterion that minimizes the between-class variance of pixel intensity to choose a threshold value for segmentation. However, the Otsu's method has a disadvantage of repeatedly searching optimal thresholds for the entire range. In this paper, a simple but fast multi-level thresholding approach is proposed by means of extending the Otsu's method. Rather than invoke the Otsu's method for the entire gray range, we advocate that the gray-level range of an image be first divided into smaller sub-ranges, and that the multi-level thresholds be achieved by iteratively invoking this dividing process. Initially, in the proposed method, the gray range of the object image is divided into 2 classes with a threshold value. Here, the threshold value for segmentation is selected by invoking the Otsu's method for the entire range. Following this, the two classes are divided into 4 classes again by applying the Otsu's method to each of the divided sub-ranges. This process is repeatedly performed until the required number of thresholds is obtained. Our experimental results for three benchmark images and fifty faces show a possibility that the proposed method could be used efficiently for pattern matching and face recognition.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.40-42
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• 2009

This paper presents an algorithm, which is based on Otsu's method, for accurate and robust endpoint detection for speech recognition under noisy environments. The features are extracted in time domain, and then an optimal threshold is selected by minimizing the discriminant criterion, so as to maximize the separability of the speech part and environment part. The simulation results show that the method play a good performance in detection accuracy.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.11C
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• pp.1140-1151
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• 2003

This paper proposes a face recognition method based on modified Otsu's binarization and Hu moment. Proposed method is robust to brightness, contrast, scale, rotation, and translation changes. As the proposed modified Otsu's binarization computes other thresholds from conventional Otsu's binarization, namely we create two binary images, we can extract higher dimensional feature vector. Here the feature vector has properties of robustness to brightness and contrast changes because the proposed method is based on Otsu's binarization. And our face recognition system is robust to scale, rotation, and translation changes because of using Hu moment. In the perspective of brightness, contrast, scale, rotation, and translation changes, experimental results with Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) database and the AR database showed that average recognition rates of conventional well-known principal component analysis (PCA) are 93.2% and 81.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed method for the same databases has superior performance of the average recognition rates of 93.2% and 81.4%, respectively.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2000.10a
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• pp.287-287
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• 2000

As a method to control the bacteria number in adequate level, a real time control system based on microscope image processing measurement for the bacteria is adopted. For the experiment, Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria such as Acinetobacter sp. are used. This paper proposed hybrid method combined watershed algorithm with adaptive automatic thresholding method to enhance segmentation efficiency of overlapped image. Experiments was done to show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to traditional Otsu's method, Otsu's method with adaptive automatic thresholding method and human visual method.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.163-169
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• 2017

There are various algorithms evaluating a threshold for image segmentation. Among them, Otsu's algorithm sets a threshold based on the histogram. It finds the between-class variance for all over gray levels and then sets the largest one as Otsu's optimal threshold, so we can see that Otsu's algorithm requires a lot of the computation. In this paper, we improved the amount of computational needs by using estimated Otsu's threshold rather than computing for all the threshold candidates. The proposed algorithm is compared with the original one in computation amount and accuracy. we confirm that the proposed algorithm is about 29 times faster than conventional method on single processor and about 4 times faster than on parallel processing architecture machine.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.368-374
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• 2010

Image segmentation is the basic step in the field of the image processing for pattern recognition, environment recognition, and context analysis. The Otsu's automatic threshold selection, which determines the optimal threshold value to maximize the between class scatter using the distribution information of the normalized histogram of a image, is the famous method among the various image segmentation methods. For the automatic threshold selection proposed by Otsu, it is difficult to determine the optimal threshold value by considering the sub-region characteristic of the image because the Otsu's algorithm analyzes the global histogram of a image. In this paper, to alleviate this difficulty of Otsu's image segmentation algorithm and to improve image segmentation capability, the original image is divided into several sub-images by using context fuzzy c-means algorithm. The proposed fuzzy Otsu threshold algorithm is applied to the divided sub-images and the several threshold values are obtained.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.725-730
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• 2007

Gray-level histogram-based threshold selection methods such as Otsu's method, Huang and Wang's method, and etc. have been widely used for the threshold selection in image processing. They are simple and effective, but take too much time to determine the optimal multilevel threshold values as the number of thresholds are increased. In this paper, we measure correlation between gray-levels by using the Gaussian function and define a Gaussian-type finite mixture distribution which is combination of the Gaussian distribution function with the gray-level histogram, and propose a fast and effective threshold selection method using it. We show the effectiveness of the proposed through experimental results applied it to three images and the efficiency though comparison of the computational complexity of the proposed with that of Otsu's method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.216-224
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• 2013

The within-class variance of Otsu's method is moderate but improper in expressing class statistical distributions. Otsu's method uses a variance to represent the distribution of each class. The variance utilizes a distance square from the mean to a data. This process is not proper in denoting a real class statistical distribution because of the distance square. In this paper, to express more exact class statistical distributions, the within-class standard deviation as a criterion for threshold selection is proposed and then the optimal threshold is determined by minimizing it. In order to have validity, it is shown through the experimental results that the proposed method was more superior to the counterparts.

• Journal of Power System Engineering
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.32-37
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• 2016

This paper proposes two measurement methods for injured rate of fish surface using color image segmentation method based on K-means clustering algorithm and Otsu's threshold algorithm. To do this task, the following steps are done. Firstly, an RGB color image of the fish is obtained by the CCD color camera and then converted from RGB to HSI. Secondly, the S channel is extracted from HSI color space. Thirdly, by applying the K-means clustering algorithm to the HSI color space and applying the Otsu's threshold algorithm to the S channel of HSI color space, the binary images are obtained. Fourthly, morphological processes such as dilation and erosion, etc. are applied to the binary image. Fifthly, to count the number of pixels, the connected-component labeling is adopted and the defined injured rate is gotten by calculating the pixels on the labeled images. Finally, to compare the performances of the proposed two measurement methods based on the K-means clustering algorithm and the Otsu's threshold algorithm, the edge detection of the final binary image after morphological processing is done and matched with the gray image of the original RGB image obtained by CCD camera. The results show that the detected edge of injured part by the K-means clustering algorithm is more close to real injured edge than that by the Otsu' threshold algorithm.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2006.04a
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• pp.126-128
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• 2006

For pattern matching, an object image should be segmented and analyzed for the first time. Thresholding is a fundamental approach to segmentation that utilizes a significant degree of pixel popularity or intensity. Otsu's thresholding is one of the most veil-known methods proposed in the literature. However, the method has a disadvantage of repeatedly searching the optimal thresholds for the entire region. To overcome this problem, a number of methods have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a simple and fast thresholding method of finding multi-level threshold values by extending the Otsu's method. Our experimental results for the benchmak images show a possibility that the proposed method could be used efficiently for pattern matching.