The main disease that decreases the manufacturing of natural rubber is tapping panel dryness (TPD). To solve this problem faced by a large number of rubber trees, it is recommended to observe TPD images and make early diagnosis. Multi-level thresholding image segmentation can extract regions of interest from TPD images for improving the diagnosis process and increasing the efficiency. In this study, we investigate TPD image properties and enhance Otsu's approach. For a multi-level thresholding problem, we combine the snake optimizer with the improved Otsu's method and propose SO-Otsu. SO-Otsu is compared with five other methods: fruit fly optimization algorithm, sparrow search algorithm, grey wolf optimizer, whale optimization algorithm, Harris hawks optimization and the original Otsu's method. The performance of the SO-Otsu is measured using detail review and indicator reviews. According to experimental findings, SO-Otsu performs better than the competition in terms of running duration, detail effect and degree of fidelity. SO-Otsu is an efficient image segmentation method for TPD images.
Keywords: Otsu's method; image segmentation; snake optimizer; tapping panel dryness.