Gaussian Barebone Salp Swarm Algorithm with Stochastic Fractal Search for medical image segmentation: A COVID-19 case study

An appropriate threshold is a key to using the multi-threshold segmentation method to solve image segmentation problems, and the swarm intelligence (SI) optimization algorithm is one of the popular methods to obtain the optimal threshold. Moreover, Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is a recently released swarm intelligent optimization algorithm. Compared with other SI optimization algorithms, the optimization solution strategy of the SSA still needs to be improved to enhance further the solution accuracy and optimization efficiency of the algorithm. Accordingly, this paper designs an effective segmentation method based on a non-local mean 2D histogram and 2D Kapur's entropy called SSA with Gaussian Barebone and Stochastic Fractal Search (GBSFSSSA) by combining Gaussian Barebone and Stochastic Fractal Search mechanism. In GBSFSSSA, the Gaussian Barebone and Stochastic Fractal Search mechanism effectively balance the global search ability and local search ability of the basic SSA. The CEC2017 competition data set is used to prove the algorithm's performance, and GBSFSSSA shows an absolute advantage over some typical competitive algorithms. Furthermore, the algorithm is applied in image segmentation of COVID-19 CT images, and the results are analyzed based on three different metrics: peak signalto-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM), and feature similarity (FSIM), which can lead to the conclusion that the overall performance of GBSFSSSA is better than the comparison algorithm and can effectively improve the segmentation of medical images. Therefore, it is justified that GBSFSSSA is a reliable and effective method in solving the multi-threshold image segmentation problem.