t-Tests, F-Tests and Otsu's Methods for Image Thresholding

2011/02/16 by Jing-Hao Xue, D. M. Titterington · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Image and Object Detection Techniques #Infrastructure Maintenance and Monitoring #Medical Image Segmentation Techniques

paper · doi:10.1109/tip.2011.2114358

openalex publication_date 2011/02/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Otsu's binarization method is one of the most popular image-thresholding methods; Student's t -test is one of the most widely-used statistical tests to compare two groups. This paper aims to stress the equivalence between Otsu's binarization method and the search for an optimal threshold that provides the largest absolute Student's t-statistic. It is then naturally demonstrated that the extension of Otsu's binarization method to multi-level thresholding is equivalent to the search for optimal thresholds that provide the largest F -statistic through one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, general equivalences between some parametric image-thresholding methods and the search for optimal thresholds with the largest likelihood-ratio test statistics are briefly discussed.

Citations

• THE GENERALIZATION OF ‘STUDENT'S’ PROBLEM WHEN SEVERAL DIFFERENT POPULATION VARLANCES ARE INVOLVED
• Survey over image thresholding techniques and quantitative performance evaluation
• A Threshold Selection Method from Gray-Level Histograms

Cited by

• Otsu's method [wikipedia]

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