In this paper, a novel satellite image segmentation technique based on dynamic Harris hawks optimization with a mutation mechanism (DHHO/M) is proposed. Compared with the original Harris hawks optimization (HHO), the dynamic control parameter strategy and mutation operator used in DHHO/M can avoid falling into the local optimum and efficiently enhance the search capability. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a series of experiments are carried out on various satellite images. Eight advanced thresholding approaches are selected for comparison. Three criteria are adopted to determine the segmentation thresholds, namely Kapur’s entropy, Tsallis entropy, and Otsu between-class variance. Furthermore, four oil pollution images are used to further assess the practicality and feasibility of the proposed method on real engineering problem. The experimental results illustrate that the DHHO/M based thresholding technique is superior to others in the following three aspects: fitness function evaluation, image segmentation effect, and statistical tests.

Multilevel thresholding has got more attention in recent years with various successful applications. However, the implementation becomes more and more complex and time-consuming when the number of thresholds is high, color images which contain more information are even worse. Therefore, this paper proposes an alternative hybrid algorithm for color image segmentation, the advantages of which lie in extracting the best features from the high performance of two algorithms and overcoming the limitations of each algorithm to some extent. Two techniques, Otsu’s method and Kapur’s entropy, are used as fitness function to determine the segmentation threshold values. Harris hawks optimization (HHO) is a novel and general-purpose algorithm, and the hybridization of HHO is fulfilled by adding another powerful algorithm—differential evolution (DE), which is known as HHO-DE. More specifically, the whole population is divided into two equal subpopulations which will be assigned to HHO and DE algorithms respectively. Then both algorithms operate in parallel to update the positions of each subpopulation during the iterative process. In order to fully demonstrate the superior performance of HHO-DE, the proposed method is compared with seven state-of-the-art algorithms by an array of experiments on ten benchmark images. Meanwhile five measures, including the average fitness values, standard deviation (STD), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structure similarity index (SSIM), and feature similarity index (FSIM), are used to evaluate the performance of each algorithm. Additionally, Wilcoxon’s rank sum test for statistical analysis and the comparison with super-pixel method are also conducted to verify the superiority of HHO-DE. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method significantly outperforms other algorithms. Hence, the HHO-DE algorithm is a remarkable and promising tool for multilevel thresholding color image segmentation.

Aquila Optimizer (AO) and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) are recently proposed meta-heuristic optimization algorithms. AO possesses strong global exploration capability but insufficient local exploitation ability. However, the exploitation phase of HHO is pretty good, while the exploration capability is far from satisfactory. Considering the characteristics of these two algorithms, an improved hybrid AO and HHO combined with a nonlinear escaping energy parameter and random opposition-based learning strategy is proposed, namely IHAOHHO, to improve the searching performance in this paper. Firstly, combining the salient features of AO and HHO retains valuable exploration and exploitation capabilities. In the second place, random opposition-based learning (ROBL) is added in the exploitation phase to improve local optima avoidance. Finally, the nonlinear escaping energy parameter is utilized better to balance the exploration and exploitation phases of IHAOHHO. These two strategies effectively enhance the exploration and exploitation of the proposed algorithm. To verify the optimization performance, IHAOHHO is comprehensively analyzed on 23 standard benchmark functions. Moreover, the practicability of IHAOHHO is also highlighted by four industrial engineering design problems. Compared with the original AO and HHO and five state-of-the-art algorithms, the results show that IHAOHHO has strong superior performance and promising prospects.