Automatic thresholding is an important technique for rail defect detection, but traditional methods are not competent enough to fit the characteristics of this application. This paper proposes the Maximum Weighted Object Correlation (MWOC) thresholding method, fitting the features that rail images are unimodal and defect proportion is small. MWOC selects a threshold by optimizing the product of object correlation and the weight term that expresses the proportion of thresholded defects. Our experimental results demonstrate that MWOC achieves misclassification error of 0.85%, and outperforms the other well-established thresholding methods, including Otsu, maximum correlation thresholding, maximum entropy thresholding and valley-emphasis method, for the application of rail defect detection.

In this study, we have proposed an efficient automatic multilevel thresholding method for image segmentation. An effective criterion for measuring the separability of the homogenous objects in the image, based on discriminant analysis, has been introduced to automatically determine the number of thresholding levels to be performed. Then, by applying this discriminant criterion, the object regions with homogeneous illuminations in the image can be recursively and automatically thresholded into separate segmented images. The proposed method is fast and effective in analyzing and thresholding the histogram of the image. In order to conduct an equitable comparative performance evaluation of the proposed method with other thresholding methods, a combinatorial scheme is also introduced to properly reduce the computational complexity of performing multilevel thresholding. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is feasible and computationally efficient in automatic multilevel thresholding for image segmentation.

A novel technique for automatic segmentation of a brain region in single channel MR images for visualization and analysis of a human brain is presented. The method generates a volume of brain masks by automatic thresholding using a dual curve fitting technique and by 3D morphological operations. The dual curve fitting can reduce an error in curve fitting to the histogram of MR images. The 3D morphological operations, including erosion, labeling of connected-components, max-feature operation, and dilation, are applied to the cubic volume of masks reconstructed from the thresholded brain masks. This method can automatically segment a brain region in any displayed type of sequences, including extreme slices, of SPGR, T1-, T2-, and PD-weighted MR image data sets which are not required to contain the entire brain. In the experiments, the algorithm was applied to 20 sets of MR images and showed over 0.97 of similarity index in comparison with manual drawing.