Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Signal Processing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/sigpro

A novel generalized entropy and its application in image thresholding MARK

a,b b,⁎ a a,b
Fangyan Nie , Pingfeng Zhang , Jianqi Li , Dehong Ding
a
Hunan Province Cooperative Innovation Center for The Construction & Development of Dongting Lake Ecological Economic Zone, Hunan University of
Arts and Science, Changde, Hunan 415000, China
b
College of Computer Science and Technology, Hunan University of Arts and Science, Changde, Hunan 415000, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A BS T RAC T

Keywords: As a technique for image segmentation, thresholding has been successfully utilized in various image processing
Image segmentation tasks. In this paper, a novel generalized entropy, that can handle the additive/nonextensive information exist in
Histogram thresholding physical system by a tunable entropic parameter r, is introduced in image segmentation. A new criterion for
Generalized entropy thresholding and algorithm based on this entropy are described in detail. The performance of the presented
Entropic parameter
method is compared with the classical entropy-based thresholding methods and some state-of-the-art methods.
Experiments on nondestructive testing images, infrared images, and some other real images are conducted. The
experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

1. Introduction
Image segmentation is a critical operation with many applications
in image processing and analysis [1]. The aim of image segmentation is
to extract the region of interest from complex scenes. High quality and
robustness of image segmentation is of considerable importance in the
practical applications. Thresholding is a straightforward and effective
technique for image segmentation [1]. Due to its simplicity and ease of
implementation, thresholding has been a popular technique used in
various image processing tasks such as pattern recognition and
classification, feature extraction and analysis [1–14]. In the process
of imaging, the quality of image is influenced by many factors, such as
light condition, type of imaging, and object of imaging. Due to the
complexity of image, there is no universal segmentation method for
different image processing tasks. Bringing new and valid method to
adapt different segmentation tasks is always one of the hard efforts in
image processing. In engineering practices, such as production line
inspection, video-based security surveillance, the system based on
machine vision is often needed high-level real-time. Thresholding
becomes a very popular technique of segmentation in image processing
field due to its excellent high-precision and real-time performance [1–
14].
In image segmentation fields, thresholding based on information
entropy theory is an intriguing issue. The entropy-based approach is
one of the most common techniques of image thresholding and is
widely applied in practice [1]. The entropy-based thresholding method
is extremely popular in theoretical research and applications because of
its solid theoretical foundation on physics and effective performance in
practice. The maximum entropy method proposed by Kapur et al. [3] is
one of the most famous entropy-based approaches. In many cases,
maximum entropy method is used as a pre-processing technique to
segment an image for further processing such as feature analysis and
quantification. The maximum entropy method searches a threshold
that maximized the Shannon entropy of the segmented image and can
achieve good results when the histogram of the background and
foreground of the original image has equal probability distribution
[4]. As such, the maximum entropy method may create suboptimal
results when the histogram of background and foreground of the image
has no equal distribution. Over the years, researchers have proposed
many methods to improve the maximum entropy method [2,5–14]. For
example, Sahoo et al. proposed a maximum Renyi entropy method
based on Renyi entropy [5], Portes de Albuquerque et al. proposed a
maximum Tsallis entropy method based on nonextensive Tsallis
entropy [6]. Renyi entropy and Tsallis entropy are the generalization
of Shannon entropy. Renyi entropy is additive for statistically inde-
pendent subsystems for entropic parameter α, and it can handle the
additive information that exist in image. Tsallis entropy has pseudo-
additivity property with entropic parameter q, and it can handle the
nonextensive information for statistically independent subsystems
through its pseudo-additivity property. The thresholding methods
based on Renyi or Tsallis entropies improve the performance of
maximum entropy. Recently, Lin and Ou [2] presented an interesting
improved Tsallis entropy thresholding method based on the analysis of
Tsallis entropy and local long-range correlation in image thresholding.
The method was applied on nondestructive testing (NDT) images and
infrared images, and good results were obtained.

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: niefyan@163.com (F. Nie), pingfengzh@qq.com (P. Zhang).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sigpro.2016.11.004
Received 22 August 2016; Received in revised form 30 October 2016; Accepted 1 November 2016
Available online 10 November 2016
0165-1684/ © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

The information that exist in pixels of image has an additive

property or a nonadditive property, such as long-range correlation,
long-term memory, and fractal. One of Renyi and Tsallis entropies
cannot handle all these information at the same time. Recently, a novel
generalized entropic measure was presented by Masi [15] based on the
analysis of the conventional thermodynamic entropies. In image
segmentation, the segmentation quality is seriously affected by the
way of measure of information of image when the entropies-based
thresholding methods are applied to segmentation. In our practices,
some exciting results are obtained when the new generalized entropic
measure is applied on image segmentation tasks. In this paper, a new
entropy-based thresholding method is proposed based on the entropic
measure presented by Masi [15] and its merits are demonstrated by
comparing classical entropies-based and some state-of-the-art meth-
ods.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the descrip-
tion related to work. In Section 3, the proposed method is presented.
The performance of the proposed method on a variety of image is
demonstrated in Section 4. Conclusion is presented in Section 5.

2. Preliminaries

2.1. The novel generalized entropy

For a complete probability distribution, i.e. P = {p1, …, pi , …, pn },

n
0 ≤ pi ≤ 1, i = 1, …, n , ∑i =1 pi = 1, the new entropic measure was
defined by Masi [15] as follows:

1 ⎡ n ⎤
Sr = log ⎢1 − (1 − r ) ∑ pi log pi ⎥⎥
1−r ⎣⎢ i =1 ⎦ (1)
where r > 0 and r ≠ 1, and it is used to measure the degree of
additivity/nonextensivity in system. From Eq. (1) we can see that for
r=1 the new entropy (for simplicity, we call the new entropic measure
as Masi entropy in the following content of this paper) reduces to the
n
Boltzmann–Gibbs entropy, i.e. Shannon entropy S = − ∑i =1 pi log pi . It
can be proved by L'Hospital's rule simply. Masi entropy combines the
nonextensivity of Tsallis entropy and the additivity of Renyi entropy
[15]. The main difference of Masi entropy to Renyi and Tsallis entropy
is that the entire probability function is raised to a power r, in contrast
to the probability functions in Renyi and Tsallis entropy where every
state-probability separately is raised to a power α or q.
For two statistically independent systems described by the prob-
ability distributions P = {pi } and Q = {qi}, i = 1, …, n , Masi entropy
satisfy
Sr (P ∩ Q) = Sr (P ) + Sr (Q) (2)
Eq. (2) represents the additivity property of Masi entropy and the
parameter r can be viewed as a measure for the degree of nonexten-
sivity that exists in system.

2.2. Review of entropies-based thresholding methods

Fig. 1. Flow chart of algorithm of new generalized entropy-based thresholding method.
Without losing generality, let I denotes an image with L gray levels
{0, 1, …, L − 1} and size M × N . Here, let G = {0, 1, …, L − 1} denotes
correspond to the object class and background one, or vice versa.
the set of gray levels of image. The number of pixels with gray level i is
Then the probability of the two classes are given by
denoted by ni and the total number of pixels by M × N . The probability
t L −1
of gray level i appeared in the image is approximated by the frequency
of gray level i occurred in image, i.e.
ω0 = ∑ hi , ω1 = ∑ hi
i =0 i = t +1 (4)
ni
hi = Thus, two new probability distributions can be derived from the
M×N (3)
L −1
above definition, one for the object (class C0) and the other for the
Obviously, hi ≥ 0 , ∑i =0 hi = 1. The entire probability distribution H background (class C1), or vice versa. The two probability distributions
of gray levels can be written as H = {h 0 , h1, …, hL −1}. Suppose that the can be written as
pixels in the image are divided into two classes C0 and C1 through a
gray level t; C0 is the set of pixels with levels {0, 1, …, t}, and the rest of h 0 h1 h
DC0: , , …, t
pixels belong to C1 = {t + 1, t + 2, …, L − 1}. C0 and C1 normally ω0 ω0 ω0 (5)

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F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 2. The original NDT images and document image. (a) Ultrasonic image ‘ndt-img1’, (b) thermal image ‘ndt-img2’, (c) eddy current image ‘ndt-img3’, (d) PCB image ‘ndt-img4’, (e)
degraded document image ‘doc-img’.

ht +1 ht +2 h 1
t
⎛ h i ⎞α
DC1: , , …, L −1 EαR (C0 ) = log ∑ ⎜⎝ ⎟
ω1 ω1 ω1 (6) α−1 ω0 ⎠
i =0 (11)
On the basis of the above definition, for a bi-level thresholding of an L −1
⎛ h i ⎞α
1
image, Kapur et al. [3] proposed the famous maximum entropy EαR (C1) = log ∑ ⎜ ⎟
α−1 ⎝ ω1 ⎠ (12)
thresholding method based on Boltzmann–Gibbs entropy, namely i = t +1

Shannon entropy. The method based on Tsallis entropy is proposed by Portes de

E (I ) = E (C0 ) + E (C1) (7) Albuquerque et al. [6], and the criterion function for thresholding is
written as
where
EqT (I ) = EqT (C0 ) + EqT (C1) + (1 − q ) EqT (C0 ) EqT (C1) (13)
t
hi h where
E (C0 ) = − ∑ log i
ω0 ω0 (8)
1 ⎡⎢ ⎤
i =0 t
⎛ h ⎞q
EqT (C0 ) = ∑ ⎜⎝ i ⎟⎠ − 1⎥
L −1 1 − q ⎢⎣ i =0 ω0 ⎦⎥ (14)
hi h
E (C1) = − ∑ log i
ω1 ω1
1 ⎡⎢ ⎤
i = t +1 (9) L −1
⎛ h ⎞q
EqT (C1) = ∑ ⎜⎝ i ⎟⎠ − 1⎥
Sahoo et al. [5] proposed the entropy-based thresholding based on 1 − q ⎢⎣ i = t +1 ω1 ⎥⎦ (15)
Renyi entropy, the criterion function of this method is given by
The information measure between two classes C0 and C1 is
EαR (I ) = EαR (C0 ) + EαR (C1) (10) maximized, and the corresponding gray level for which this happens
is considered to be the optimum threshold value for the above three
where methods.

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F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 3. The ground-truths of original NDT and document images. (a) ndt-img1, (b) ndt-img2, (c) ndt-img3, (d) ndt-img4, (e) doc-img.

Based on the analysis of Tsallis entropy and the local long-range where
correlation in image thresholding, the criterion of the interesting
1 ⎡ t
⎛ hi ⎞ ⎛ hi ⎞ ⎤
improved Tsallis entropy thresholding method proposed by Lin and Er (C0 ) = log ⎢1 − (1 − r ) ∑ ⎜⎝ ⎟ log ⎜ ⎟ ⎥
Ou [2] is given by 1−r ⎣⎢ i =0
ω0 ⎠ ⎝ ω0 ⎠ ⎥⎦ (18)
t * = arg max{min[E (C0 ), EqT (C1)]} ⎡
t∈G (16) 1
L −1
⎛ hi ⎞ ⎛ hi ⎞ ⎤
Er (C1) = log ⎢1 − (1 − r ) ∑ ⎜ ⎟ log ⎜ ⎟ ⎥
1−r ⎢⎣ i = t +1
⎝ ω1 ⎠ ⎝ ω1 ⎠ ⎥⎦ (19)
*
Let G = {0, 1, …, L − 1}, the optima threshold value t for image
3. The proposed method thresholding can be determined by maximizing the new criterion

In this section, we describe the proposed segmentation method. In t * = arg max[Er (I |t )]

t∈G (20)
the first part, we define the different used criteria. In the second part,
the algorithm of the proposed method is narrated, and the principle of
the proposed method is illustrated in Fig. 1. A detailed description of
the different parts is presented thereafter. 3.2. The thresholding algorithm

The algorithm of the proposed method is organized as follows and

3.1. Thresholding criterion based on Masi entropy
According to the principle of Masi entropy, for an optimal threshold
value t, the new criterion for image thresholding proposed here can be
defined as
Er (I |t ) = Er (C0 ) + Er (C1)
the flow chart of the algorithm is illustrated in Fig. 1.
Step 1: Input a grayscale image with size M × N that will be
segmented, and save it into an image array I. The maximal gray level
L − 1 is calculated by max(I), and the normalized histogram, i.e. the
gray level probability distribution H = {h 0, …, hL −1} of the image is
(17) calculated by Eq. (3).

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F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 4. The histograms of original NDT and document images. (a) ndt-img1, (b) ndt-img2, (c) ndt-img3, (d) ndt-img4, (e) doc-img.

Table 1
Thresholds, numbers of misclassified pixels, values of ME, and running times obtained by using different methods for the NDT images and document image.

Images Thresholding methods

Kapur Portes Xue Cai Lin Proposed method

ndt-img1 Threshold 139 139 177 129 167 160

Misclassified pixels 2134 2134 679 4037 384 557
ME 0.0702 0.0702 0.0223 0.1328 0.01263 0.0183
Running times (s) 0.0131 0.0141 0.0089 0.0115 0.0139 0.0135
ndt-img2 Threshold 115 116 55 151 221 221
Misclassified pixels 47615 47442 52939 34341 296 296
ME 0.8526 0.8495 0.9480 0.6149 0.0053 0.0053
Running times (s) 0.0129 0.0149 0.0087 0.0116 0.0145 0.0135
ndt-img3 Threshold 183 182 203 178 167 174
Misclassified pixels 371 295 5857 122 180 36
ME 0.0377 0.0299 0.5949 0.0124 0.0183 0.0037
Running times (s) 0.0069 0.0081 0.0063 0.0101 0.0064 0.0076
ndt-img4 Threshold 155 155 68 100 66 83
Misclassified pixels 12305 12305 1385 1588 1630 161
ME 0.2183 0.2183 0.0246 0.0282 0.0289 0.0029
Running times (s) 0.0143 0.0158 0.0098 0.0156 0.0154 0.0148
doc-img Threshold 171 163 191 168 114 114
Misclassified pixels 3683 2585 7311 3319 131 131
ME 0.0294 0.0207 0.0585 0.0265 0.0010 0.0010
Running times (s) 0.0169 0.0198 0.0113 0.0173 0.0194 0.0171

Step 2: Set an applicable value for the parameter r of Masi entropy
used here in range (0, 1) ∪ (1, +∞), and set a real number less than
zero to MaxE, a variable to save the value of image generalized entropy
in iteration of algorithm.
Step 3: Assume that t is a threshold value that used to thresholding
image I, then the gray levels of image I is divided into two classes by t,
one is C0 and the other is C1, i.e. C0 = {0, 1, …, t},
C1 = {t + 1, t + 2, …, L − 1}.
Step 4: The prior probability ω0 and ω1 about C0 and C1 are
calculated by Eq. (4), and the two new probability distributions of DC0
and DC1 are created through Eqs. (5) and (6).
Step 5: The Masi entropy of DC0 and DC1, and the total entropy of
image I are computed by Eqs. (18), (19), and (17) respectively.
Step 6: Search for the optimal threshold value t* in
G = {0, 1, …, L − 1} by Eq. (20).
Step 7: Complete the image segmentation through thresholding by
the optimal threshold value t*.
Step 8: Output the segmented image.
The flow chart of this algorithm is illustrated in Fig. 1.

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F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 5. Segmentation results of ndt-img1 by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.

Fig. 6. Segmentation results of ndt-img2 by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.

4. Experimental results and discussion
In this section, we present the results obtained through the
application of the proposed method to nondestructive testing (NDT)
images, infrared images, and some other kinds of images.
Nondestructive testing and video surveillance based on infrared
imaging are two popular applications of image processing. Owing to
the effect of complex illumination and bad-imaging environment, the
image quality of these images is bad and the resolution is usually low.
The segmentation of NDT image and infrared image is a difficult task in
applications of machine vision.
We evaluate the performance results in comparison with those of
five other methods: the maximum entropy method proposed by Kapur
et al. [3], the maximum Tsallis entropy method proposed by Portes de
Albuquerque et al. [6]; two state-of-the-art methods have been applied
successfully on segmentation of NDT images, i.e. the median-based
minimum error thresholding method proposed by Xue and
Titterington [16], and the iterative triclass thresholding technique
based on Otsu method proposed by Cai et al. [17]; in addition,
especially, the improved Tsallis entropy method proposed recently by
Lin and Ou [2] is taken to compare with the proposed method in this
paper. As a matter of convenience, these methods are called Kapur,

28
F. Nie et al.
Fig. 7. Segmentation results of ndt-img3 by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.
Portes, Xue, Cai, and Lin methods respectively in latter parts of this
paper.
All algorithms mentioned here are coded in Matlab (2007b) and are
run on a personal computer with Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6200U CPU
2.30 GHz, 8 GB memories, under Microsoft Windows 10 Operating
system.
4.1. Evaluation of the performance
In order to measure the performance of the segmentation, we used
the criterion of misclassification error (ME) [1]. ME is defined in terms
of correlation of the images with human observation. It corresponds to
the ratio of background pixels wrongly assigned to the foreground, and
vice versa. ME can be simply expressed as
|BO ∩ BT | + |FO ∩ FT |
ME = 1 −
|BO | + |FO |
where BO and FO denote the background and foreground of the
ground-truth image, respectively. BT and FT denote the background
and foreground of the result image, respectively. |•| is the number of
elements of the set •. In the best case of ideal thresholding, ME is equal
to 0, and in the worst case, ME value is 1. ME provides a measure of the
misclassified pixels between the ideal image and the test image
thresholded by the proposed algorithm.
Four NDT images and a degraded document image employed in a
comprehensive survey of image thresholding methods [1] are taken
here to evaluate the performance of six thresholding methods refer-
enced in this paper. The original NDT images and the degraded
document image are shown in Fig 2. Fig. 2(a) is a ultrasonic image,
Fig. 2(b) is a thermal image, Fig. 2(c) is an eddy current image,
Fig. 2(d) is a defective printed circuit board (PCB) image, and Fig. 2(e)
is the degraded document image. The sizes of these images are
232×131, 246×227, 107×92, 232×243, and 551×227, respectively.
Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34
To facilitate the narrative, these images are called ‘ndt-img1’, ‘ndt-
img2’, ‘ndt-img3’,‘ndt-img4’, and ‘doc-img’ in latter part of this paper.
The ground-truths of these images provided by Sezgin are shown in
Fig. 3. Fig. 4 shows the histograms of these images. From Fig. 4, we can
see that the gray level distribution of these images are complex, it is
difficult to search the veritable valley to divide the object and back-
ground of images.
The results in terms of thresholds, numbers of misclassified pixels,
values of ME, and running times obtained by applying various methods
to the five images are listed in Table 1. Figs. 5–9 show the thresholding
segmentation results of these five images by the above mentioned six
methods.
The proposed method, Lin method, and Portes method involve the
parameter settings of r or q. According to the ME, the value of r and q
are set as the optimal value that make the proposed and Lin method
obtain the minimum ME value on the test NDT and document images.
(21) For the five images, the values of parameter r of the proposed methods
are set as 1.252, 1.36, 1.31, 1.31, and 1.22, respectively. For the Lin
and Ou method, the values of the parameter q are set as 0.92, 0.65,
1.001, 1.21, and 0.9 respectively for the five test images. For Portes
method, the change of optimal threshold is little when the value of q is
changed. So, the value of q of Portes method is set as 0.8, a
recommended value in many literatures, such as in [2,8], on all test
images.
From Table 1, it can be seen that the segmentation results yielded
by the proposed method have less misclassified pixels and low ME
values, that is, the new method obtains better results. This observation
can further be judged by comparing what could be perceived in Figs. 5–
9. From Table 1, Figs. 3 and Figs. 5–9, one can conclude that the
segmentation results obtained by the proposed method are closest to
the ideal ones. Among these methods, the poor results are obtained by
the method proposed by Kapur et al, and the method proposed by
Portes de Albuquerque et al. On the ndt-img2 and ndt-img3 images,
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F. Nie et al.
Fig. 8. Segmentation results of ndt-img4 by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.
Fig. 9. Segmentation results of doc-img by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.
the Xue method obtains bad results. On the ndt-img1 and ndt-img2
images, the Cai method obtains bad results. The segmentation results
obtained by Lin method are better than other methods except the
proposed new method in this paper. Table 1 also shows that running
time of the proposed method is usually less than 0.03 s for all tested
images. It meets real-time segmentation tasks.
4.2. Experiments on other real images
In order to further compare the performance of various methods,
one infrared pedestrian image, and two benchmark test images, named
‘cameraman’ and ‘rice’, are chosen here. The three images are named
‘IR’, ‘cameraman’, and ‘rice’ in latter part of this paper. The sizes of the
30
Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34
three images are 240×320, 256×256, and 256×256, respectively. The
original images and histograms of the three images are shown in
Fig. 10. From Fig. 10, we can see that the gray levels of objects and
backgrounds of images blend mutually. Table 2 lists the thresholds and
the running times obtained by the referenced six methods.
In this subsection, the setting of value of r or q for the proposed
method and Lin method is according to the visual effect of the
segmented result of image. Here, the values of parameter r of the
proposed method are set as 0.8, 1.3, and 1.1 for the three test images.
For Lin and Ou method, the values of parameter q are set as 1.2, 1.1,
and 1.2 through adjusting on computer, observing, comparing and
dynamic regulating. The value of q for Portes method is still set as 0.8
here.
F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 10. Original images of three real images and their histogram. (a) IR, (b) cameraman, (c) rice, (d)–(f) histograms of (a)–(c).

Table 2
Thresholds, and running times obtained by using different methods for three real images.

Images Thresholding methods

Kapur Portes Xue Cai Lin Proposed method

IR Threshold 92 101 184 82 101 93

Running times (s) 0.0093 0.0103 0.0081 0.0108 0.0099 0.0096
Cameraman Threshold 192 192 31 97 50 72
Running times (s) 0.0172 0.0169 0.0102 0.0152 0.0184 0.0163
Rice Threshold 118 121 40 112 99 112
Running times (s) 0.0131 0.0142 0.0089 0.0134 0.0146 0.0123

From Table 2 and the histograms of the three images displayed in
Fig. 10, we can see that the optimal thresholds obtained by the
proposed method are the closest to the valley of the histograms of
images. The thresholds obtained by other methods deviate in varying
degrees from the valley of the histogram of image. From Figs. 11 to 13,
it can be seen that the segmented results obtained by the proposed
method are better than those obtained by other methods. The proposed
method achieves better visual effect, as it not only preserves more
details of objects, but also contains less background noise. The objects
in the results obtained by the proposed method are complete, and
edges are smooth and clear. The Kapur and Portes methods yield the
worst results for the cameraman image. The Xue method yields the
worst results on IR and rice images. There are some under-segmenta-
tion for Cai method on IR and cameraman images. The running times
obtained by the proposed method are less than 0.02 s, and meet the
demand of real-time task.
4.3. Parameter r
In the proposed method, there is a parameter r, which is used to
measure the degree of additivity and/or nonextensivity might exist in
system. In image thresholding, parameter r is adjustable and can play
as a tuning factor in the segmentation process. The proposed method is
able to accommodate different image segmentation tasks by adjusting
the value of parameter r. It also is a merit of the proposed method. In
most cases of our experiments on many images, we find that
0.5 ≤ r ≤ 1.5 is a proper interval. On many images, we choose 1.2 as
the proper value of parameter r.
In our experiments, the proper value of parameter r is chosen
manually, it is troublesome and inconvenient in applications. How to
select an optimal value for parameter r in application? For a series of
images taken from the same background and same imaging device, we
can assume that the degrees of additivity and/or nonextensivity of
pixels in these images are similar. Thus, for the same application
scenario, we can choose a optimal value for the parameter r through
some training sample images. Then, the chosen optimal value is set to
parameter r in application. Here, we choose a series of images from
Terravic Motion IR Database [18] as the example to illustrate. Two
subjects (pedestrians) in this series of images, they walk towards each
other, crossing paths, and continue until they exit the field of view. On
image of this series of images, we find that the good result is obtained
by the proposed method when the value of parameter r is set as 1.2. So,
for the segmentation of this series of images, the value of parameter r is
set as 1.2 on all images. Fifteen images, i.e. 000270, 000290, 000310,
000330, 000350, 000380, 000390, 000430, 000460, 000480, 000500,
000520, 000540, 000560, and 000600 are selected from this series of
images to illustrate this point. The fifteen original images are shown in
Fig. 14, and the segmented results are shown in Fig. 15.

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F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 11. Segmentation results of IR image by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.

Fig. 12. Segmentation results of cameraman image by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b) Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.

5. Conclusions and future work
A novel generalized entropy with parameter r was defined to handle
the information with additivity or nonextensivity in physical system. In
this paper, the novel entropy is introduced in the fields of image
segmentation, and a new image thresholding method is proposed based
the new entropy. The implementation of algorithm and the perfor-
mance of the proposed method are elaborated in this paper.
Experimental results on a variety of images, including NDT images,
infrared images and other images, demonstrate the superiority of the

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F. Nie et al. Signal Processing 134 (2017) 23–34

Fig. 13. Segmentation results of rice image by different methods. (a) Kapur, (b)Portes, (c) Xue, (d) Cai, (e) Lin, (f) Proposed method.

Fig. 14. Fifteen original infrared pedestrian images selected from a series of images.

proposed method. Acknowledgments

Except for the above advantages, the experimental results also
showed that the proposed approach has excellent real-time perfor-
mance. In future, as a development of this work, we will apply the
proposed method on more application scenarios.
We wish to thank Dr. M. Sezgin for supplying NDT images and the
ground-truths images used in this paper, and we also thank R.
Miezianko for supplying the IR database (Terravic Motion IR
Database). This work is partially supported by the Scientific Research
Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department, China (Grant No.
14B124), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.

33
F. Nie et al.
Fig. 15. Segmentation results of fifteen infrared pedestrian images by the proposed method (r = 1.2) .
61403136), the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China
(Grant No. 14JJ5008), the Science and Technology Planning Project of
Hunan Province, China (Grant No. 2016GK2019), and the Construct
Program of the Key Discipline in Hunan University of Arts and Science,
China.
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