The major problem with thresholding is that we consider only the intensity, not any relationships between the

pixels.There is no guarantee that the pixels identified by the thresholding process are contiguous.We can easily include extraneous pixels that arent part of the desired region, and we can just as easily miss isolated pixels within the region (especially near the boundaries of the region). These effects get worse as the noise gets worse,simply because its more likely that a pixels intensity doesnt represent the normal intensity in the region.When we use thresholding, we typically have to play with it, sometimes losing too much of the region and sometimes getting too many extraneous background pixels. Shadows of objects in the image are also a real pain not just where they fall across another object but where they mistakenly get included as part of a dark object on a light background.

In many applications of image processing, the gray levels of pixels belonging to the object are substantially different from the gray levels of the pixels belonging to the background. Thresholding then becomes a simple but effective tool to separate objects from the background.

The output of the thresholding operation is a binary image whose one state will indicate the foreground objects, that is, printed text, a legend, a target, defective part of a material, etc., while the complementary state will correspond to the background. Depending on the application, the foreground can be represented by gray-level 0, that is, black as for text, and the background by the highest luminance for document paper, that is 255 in 8-bit images, or conversely the foreground by white and the background by black. Various factors, such as non-stationary and correlated noise, ambient illumination, busyness of gray levels within the object and its background, inadequate contrast, and object size not commensurate with the scene, complicate the thresholding operation. Finally, the lack of objective measures to assess the performance of various thresholding algorithms, and the difficulty of extensive testing in a taskoriented environment, have been other major handicaps.

In this study we develop taxonomy of thresholding algorithms based on the type of information used, and we assess their performance comparatively using a set of objective segmentation quality

metrics. We distinguish six categories, namely, thresholding algorithms based on the exploitation of: 1. histogram shape information, 2. Measurement space clustering, 3. histogram entropy information, 4. image attribute information, 5. spatial information, and 6. local characteristics.