• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.16 no.5 s.98
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• pp.48-57
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• 1999

Applications of thresholding technique are based on the assumption that object and background pixels in a digital image can be distinguished by their gray level values. For the segmentation of more complex images, it is necessary to resort to multiple threshold selection techniques. This paper describes a new method for multiple threshold selection of gray level images which are not clearly distinguishable from the background. The proposed method consists of three main stages. In the first stage, a probability distribution function for a gray level histogram of an image is derived. Cluster points are defined according to the probability distribution function. In the second stage, fuzzy partition matrix of the probability distribution function is generated through the fuzzy clustering process. Finally, elements of the fuzzy partition matrix are classified as clusters according to gray level values by using max-membership method. Boundary values of classified clusters are selected as multiple threshold. In order to verify the performance of the developed algorithm, automatic inspection process of ball grid array is presented.