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Moment-based alignment for shape prior with variational B-spline level set

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Abstract

This paper presents a new shape prior-based implicit active contour model for image segmentation. The paper proposes an energy functional including a data term and a shape prior term. The data term, inspired from the region-based active contour approach, evolves the contour based on the region information of the image to segment. The shape prior term, defined as the distance between the evolving shape and a reference shape, constraints the evolution of the contour with respect to the reference shape. Especially, in this paper, we present shapes via geometric moments, and utilize the shape normalization procedure, which takes into account the affine transformation, to align the evolving shape with the reference one. By this way, we could directly calculate the shape transformation, instead of solving a set of coupled partial differential equations as in the gradient descent approach. In addition, we represent the level-set function in the proposed energy functional as a linear combination of continuous basic functions expressed on a B-spline basic. This allows a fast convergence to the segmentation solution. Experiment results on synthetic, real, and medical images show that the proposed model is able to extract object boundaries even in the presence of clutter and occlusion.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for supporting this research under the Grant No.NSC-101-2221-E-008-001. They would like to thank Dr. Weiping Liu in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, for providing the data set and test images of terracotta warrior used in Section 5. They would also like to thank the reviewers and the Associate Editor for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have greatly helped in improving the content of this paper.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Central University, Chungli, 320, Taiwan

    Thi-Thao Tran, Van-Truong Pham & Kuo-Kai Shyu

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  1. Thi-Thao Tran
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Tran, TT., Pham, VT. & Shyu, KK. Moment-based alignment for shape prior with variational B-spline level set. Machine Vision and Applications 24, 1075–1091 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-013-0504-2

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