RODRIGUES, PauloGIRALDI, G. A.2019-08-172019-08-172011RODRIGUES, Paulo; GIRALDI, G. A. Improving the non-extensive medical image segmentation based on Tsallis entropy. Pattern Analysis and Applications, v. 14, n. 4, p. 369-379, 2011.1433-7541https://repositorio.fei.edu.br/handle/FEI/981Thresholding techniques for image segmentation is one of the most popular approaches in Computational Vision systems. Recently, M. Albuquerque has proposed a thresholding method (Albuquerque et al. in Pattern Recognit Lett 25:1059–1065, 2004) based on the Tsallis entropy, which is a generalization of the traditional Shannon entropy through the introduction of an entropic parameter q. However, the solution may be very dependent on the q value and the development of an automatic approach to compute a suitable value for q remains also an open problem. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the Tsallis theory in order to improve the non-extensive segmentation method. Specifically, we work out over a suitable property of Tsallis theory, named the pseudo-additive property, which states the formalism to compute the whole entropy from two probability distributions given an unique q value. Our idea is to use the original M. Albuquerque’s algorithm to compute an initial threshold and then update the q value using the ratio of the areas observed in the image histogram for the background and foreground. The proposed technique is less sensitive to the q value and overcomes the M. Albuquerque and k-means algorithms, as we will demonstrate for both ultrasound breast cancer images and synthetic data.Acesso AbertoArtigo10.1007/s10044-011-0225-yhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-011-0225-yNon-extensive entropyThresholding segmentationTsallis entropy