Entropy-based image thresholding is one of the most widely used segmentation techniques in image processing. The Tsallis and Masi entropies are information measures that can capture long-range interactions in various physical systems. On the other hand, Shannon entropy is more appropriate for short-range correlations. In this paper, we have improved a thresholding technique based on Tsallis and Shannon formulas by using Masi entropy. Specifically, we replace the Tsallis information measure with Masi’s one, obtaining better results than the original methodology. As the proposed method depends on an entropic parameter, we designed a thresholding algorithm that incorporates a simulated annealing procedure for parameter optimization. Then, we compared our results with thresholding methods that use just Masi (or Tsallis), or a combination of them, Shannon, Sine, and Hill entropies. The comparison is enriched with a kernel version of a support vector machine, as well as a discussion of our proposal in relation to deep learning approaches. Quantitative measures of segmentation accuracy demonstrated the superior performance of our method in infrared, nondestructive testing (NDT), as well as RGB images from the BSDS500 dataset.

Image thresholding based on entropic concepts is one of the most used segmentation techniques in image processing. The Tsallis and Masi entropies are information measures that can capture long-range interactions in various physical systems, while Shannon entropy is more appropriate for short-range correlations. In this paper, we have improved a thresholding technique based on Tsallis and Shannon formulas by using Masi entropy. Specifically, we replace the Tsallis information measure with Masi's one, obtaining better results than the original methodology. We also compared our results with thresholding methods that use just Masi (or Tsallis) entropy. Quantitative measures of segmentation accuracy demonstrated the superior performance of our method in infrared images and nondestructive testing (NDT) images.