Teager-Kaiser Energy bi-level thresholding

In this paper an automatic bi-level thresholding method of grey scale images using the Teager-Kaiser Energy Operator (TKEO) is proposed. The TKEO, a quadratic filter, is used to enhance high frequency information which is then combined with image grey values to estimate the threshold value. More precisely, this threshold is the average of the grey values by the energy at each pixel. The TKEO reflects better the local activity than the amplitude of the gradient. The performance of the thresholding is illustrated on different images and results compared to Otsu [1] and Kitler et al. [2] methods respectively.