Abstract:In this paper, we present new image segmentation methods based on hidden Markov random fields (HMRFs) and cuckoo search (CS) variants. HMRFs model the segmentation problem as a minimization of an energy function. CS algorithm is one of the recent powerful optimization techniques. Therefore, five variants of the CS algorithm are used to compute a solution. Through tests, we conduct a study to choose the CS variant with parameters that give good results (execution time and quality of segmentation). CS variants are evaluated and compared with non-destructive testing (NDT) images using a misclassification error (ME) criterion.