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Merging Active Contours

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Advances in Visual Computing (ISVC 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 5359))

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Abstract

In current active contour image segmentation methods, the number of regions is assumed to be known beforehand. It is related directly to a fixed number of active curves. How to allow it to vary is an important question which has been generally avoided. This study investigates a segmentation prior related to regions area to allow the number of regions to vary automatically during curve evolution, thereby optimizing the objective functional implicitly with respect to the number of regions. The obtained evolution equations show that the proposed prior can cause some curves to disappear while other curves expand, thereby leading to a region merging by curve evolution, although not in the sense of the traditional one-step merging of two regions. We give a statistical interpretation to the coefficient of this prior to balance its effect systematically against the other functional terms. We show the validity and efficiency of the method by testing on real images of intensity. A comparison demonstrates the advantages of the proposed method over the region-competition algorithm in regard to the optimal number of regions and computational load.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GE Healthcare, 268 Grosvenor, E5-137, London, ON, N6A 4V2, Canada

    Ismail Ben Ayed

  2. Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, INRS-EMT, 800, de La Gauchetière Ouest, Montréal, QC, H5A 1K6, Canada

    Amar Mitiche

Authors
  1. Ismail Ben Ayed
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  2. Amar Mitiche
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. Digital Image Research Center, Kingston University, London, UK

    Paolo Remagnino

  6. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, P.O. Box 02139, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Fatih Porikli

  7. Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box, FL 32611-6120, Gainsville, USA

    Jörg Peters

  8. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, NY 10532, Hawthorne, USA

    James Klosowski

  9. 128 Memorial Mall, Stewart B001, IN 47907, West Lafayette, USA

    Laura Arns

  10. Denver Museum of Nature and Space, 2001 Colorade Blvd. Denver,, CO 80205, USA

    Yu Ka Chun

  11. Departmen of Computer Science,, NC State University, Campus Box 8206, NC 27695-8206, Raleigh, USA

    Theresa-Marie Rhyne

  12. Los Alamos National Labs, P.O. Box 1663, NM 87545, Los Alamos, USA

    Laura Monroe

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ben Ayed, I., Mitiche, A. (2008). Merging Active Contours. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5359. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89646-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89646-3_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89645-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89646-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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