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Adaptive active contour model driven by image data field for image segmentation with flexible initialization

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Abstract

In this paper, a novel adaptive active contour model based on image data field for image segmentation with robust and flexible initializations is proposed. We firstly construct a new external energy term deduced from the image data field that drives the level set function to move in the opposite direction along the boundaries of object and an adaptive length regularization term based on the image local entropy. The designed external energy and length regularization term are then incorporated into a variationlevel set framework with an additional penalizing energy term. Due to the adaptive sign–changing property of the external energy and the adaptive length regularization term, the proposed model can tackle images with clutter background and noise, the level set function can be initialized as any bounded functions (e.g., constant function), which implies the proposed model is robust to initialization of contours. Experimental results on both synthetic and real images from different modalities confirm the effectiveness and competivive performance of the proposed method compared with other representative models.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful and vaulable comments for improving our paper. This work is paritally supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61901292), Scientific and Technological Innovation Programs of Higher Education Institutions in Shanxi (No. 2017141), the Natural Science Foundation of Shanxi Province, China (No. 201801D221186) and School Foundation of Taiyuan University of Technology (No. 2017QN11, No. 2017QN12).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Data Science, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, 030024, China

    Yongfei Wu, Xilin Liu & Daoxiang Zhou

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China

    Yongfei Wu

  3. College of Mathematics and Statistics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 401331, China

    Yang Liu

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  1. Yongfei Wu
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  2. Xilin Liu
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  4. Yang Liu
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Correspondence to Daoxiang Zhou.

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Wu, Y., Liu, X., Zhou, D. et al. Adaptive active contour model driven by image data field for image segmentation with flexible initialization. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 33633–33658 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08098-8

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