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This paper addresses the problem of image segmentation by means of active contours, whose evolution is driven by the gradient flow derived from an energy functional that is based on the Bhattacharyya distance. In particular, given the values of a photo- metric variable (or of a set thereof), which is to be used for classifying the image pixels, the active contours are designed to converge to the shape that results in maximal discrepancy between the empirical distributions of the photometric variable inside and outside of the contours. The above discrepancy is measured by means of the Bhattacharyya distance that proves to be an extremely useful tool for solving the problem at hand. The proposed methodology can be viewed as a generalization of the segmentation methods, in which active contours maximize the difference between a finite number of empirical moments of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ distributions. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed methodology is very versatile and flexible in the sense that it allows one to easily accommodate a diversity of the image features based on which the segmentation should be performed. As an additional contribution, a method for automatically adjusting the smoothness properties of the empirical distributions is proposed. Such a procedure is crucial in situations when the number of data samples (supporting a certain segmentation class) varies considerably in the course of the evolution of the active contour. In this case, the smoothness properties of the empirical distributions have to be properly adjusted to avoid either over-or underestimation artifacts. Finally, a number of relevant segmentation results are demonstrated and some further research directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Snakes, or active contours, have been widely used in image processing applications. Typical roadblocks to consistent performance include limited capture range, noise sensitivity, and poor convergence to concavities. This paper proposes a new external force for active contours, called vector field convolution (VFC), to address these problems. VFC is calculated by convolving the edge map generated from the image with the user-defined vector field kernel. We propose two structures for the magnitude function of the vector field kernel, and we provide an analytical method to estimate the parameter of the magnitude function. Mixed VFC is introduced to alleviate the possible leakage problem caused by choosing inappropriate parameters. We also demonstrate that the standard external force and the gradient vector flow (GVF) external force are special cases of VFC in certain scenarios. Examples and comparisons with GVF are presented in this paper to show the advantages of this innovation, including superior noise robustness, reduced computational cost, and the flexibility of tailoring the force field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose to focus on the segmentation of vectorial features (e.g. vector fields or color intensity) using region-based active contours. We search for a domain that minimizes a criterion based on homogeneity measures of the vectorial features. We choose to evaluate, within each region to be segmented, the average quantity of information carried out by the vectorial features, namely the joint entropy of vector components. We do not make any assumption on the underlying distribution of joint probability density functions of vector components, and so we evaluate the entropy using non parametric probability density functions. A local shape minimizer is then obtained through the evolution of a deformable domain in the direction of the shape gradient. The first contribution of this paper lies in the methodological approach used to differentiate such a criterion. This approach is mainly based on shape optimization tools. The second one is the extension of this method to vectorial data. We apply this segmentation method on color images for the segmentation of color homogeneous regions. We then focus on the segmentation of synthetic vector fields and show interesting results where motion vector fields may be separated using both their length and their direction. Then, optical flow is estimated in real video sequences and segmented using the proposed technique. This leads to promising results for the segmentation of moving video objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider a new approach for single object segmentation in 3D images. Our method improves the classical geodesic active surface model. It greatly simplifies the model initialization and naturally avoids local minima by incorporating user extra information into the segmentation process. The initialization procedure is reduced to introducing 3D curves into the image. These curves are supposed to belong to the surface to extract and thus, also constitute user given information. Hence, our model finds a surface that has these curves as boundary conditions and that minimizes the integral of a potential function that corresponds to the image features. Our goal is achieved by using globally minimal paths. We approximate the surface to extract by a discrete network of paths. Furthermore, an interpolation method is used to build a mesh or an implicit representation based on the information retrieved from the network of paths. Our paper describes a fast construction obtained by exploiting the Fast Marching algorithm and a fast analytical interpolation method. Moreover, a Level set method can be used to refine the segmentation when higher accuracy is required. The algorithm has been successfully applied to 3D medical images and synthetic images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to provide a tutorial introduction to the topic of edge detection of the tongue from ultrasound scans for researchers in speech science and phonetics. The method introduced here is Active Contours (also called snakes), a method for searching for an edge, assuming that it is a smooth curve in the image data. The advantage of this approach is that it is robust to the noisy speckle that clouds edges. This method has been implemented in several software packages currently used for detecting the edge of the tongue in ultrasound images. The tutorial concludes with an overview of the scale-space and Kalman filter approaches, state-of-the-art developments in image processing that will likely influence work on tongue edge detection in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new density matching method based on background mismatching for tracking of nonrigid moving objects. The new tracking method extends the idea behind, the original density-matching tracker [7], which tracks an object by finding a contour in which the photometric density sampled from the enclosed region most closely matches a model density. This method can be quite sensitive to the initial curve placements and model density. The new method eliminates these sensitivities by adding a second term to the optimization: The mismatch between the model density and the density sampled from the background. By maximizing this term, the tracking algorithm becomes significantly more robust in practice. Furthermore, we show the enhanced ability of the algorithm to deal with target objects which possess smooth or diffuse boundaries. The tracker is in the form of a partial differential equation, and is implemented using the level-set framework. Experiments on synthesized images and real video sequences show our proposed methods are effective and robust; the results are compared with several existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliable and efficient optic disk localization and segmentation are important tasks in automated retinal screening. General-purpose edge detection algorithms often fail to segment the optic disk due to fuzzy boundaries, inconsistent image contrast or missing edge features. This paper presents an algorithm for the localization and segmentation of the optic nerve head boundary in low-resolution images (about 20 μ/pixel). Optic disk localization is achieved using specialized template matching, and segmentation by a deformable contour model. The latter uses a global elliptical model and a local deformable model with variable edge-strength dependent stiffness. The algorithm is evaluated against a randomly selected database of 100 images from a diabetic screening programme. Ten images were classified as unusable; the others were of variable quality. The localization algorithm succeeded on all bar one usable image; the contour estimation algorithm was qualitatively assessed by an ophthalmologist as having Excellent-Fair performance in 83% of cases, and performs well even on blurred images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to describe a semiautomated segmentation method for the liver and evaluate its performance on CT-scan and MR images. Methods: First, an approximate 3-D model of the liver is initialized from a few user-generated contours to globally outline the liver shape. The model is then automatically deformed by a Laplacian mesh optimization scheme until it precisely delineates the patient's liver. A correction tool was implemented to allow the user to improve the segmentation until satisfaction. Results: The proposed method was tested against 30 CT-scans from the SLIVER07 challenge repository and 20 MR studies from the Montreal University Hospital Center, covering a wide spectrum of liver morphologies and pathologies. The average volumetric overlap error was 5.1% for CT and 7.6% for MRI and the average segmentation time was 6 min. Conclusion: The obtained results show that the proposed method is efficient, reliable, and could effectively be used routinely in the clinical setting. Significance: The proposed approach can alleviate the cumbersome and tedious process of slice-wise segmentation required for precise hepatic volumetry, virtual surgery, and treatment planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel target contour tracking method under sophisticated background using the multiple cues-based active contour model. To locate the target position, a contour-based mean-shift tracker is designed which combines both color and texture information. To reduce the adverse impact of sophisticated background and also accelerate the curve motion, we propose a two-layer-based target appearance model that combines both discriminative pre-learned-based global layer and voting-based local layer. The proposed appearance model is able to extract rough target region from the complex background, which provides important target region information for our active contour model. We subsequently introduce a dynamical shape model to provide prior target shape information for more stable segmentation. To obtain accurate target boundaries, we design a new multiple cues-based active contour model which integrates with target edge, discriminative region, and shape information. The experimental results on 30 video sequences demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other competitive contour tracking methods under various tracking environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active Contour Models ( ACMs) constitute an efficient energy-based image segmentation framework. They usually deal with the segmentation problem as an optimization problem, formulated in terms of a suitable functional, constructed in such a way that its minimum is achieved in correspondence with a contour that is a close approximation of the actual object boundary. However, for existing ACMs, handling images that contain objects characterized by many different intensities still represents a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel ACM that combines-in a global and unsupervised way-the advantages of the Self-Organizing Map ( SOM) within the level set framework of a state-of-the-art unsupervised global ACM, the Chan-Vese (C-V) model. We term our proposed model SOM-based Chan-Vese ( SOMCV) active contour model. It works by explicitly integrating the global information coming from the weights (prototypes) of the neurons in a trained SOM to help choosing whether to shrink or expand the current contour during the optimization process, which is performed in an iterative way. The proposed model can handle images that contain objects characterized by complex intensity distributions, and is at the same time robust to the additive noise. Experimental results show the high accuracy of the segmentation results obtained by the SOMCV model on several synthetic and real images, when compared to the Chan-Vese model and other image segmentation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a generalization of the level set segmentation approach by supplying a novel method for adaptive estimation of active contour parameters. The presented segmentation method is fully automatic once the lesion has been detected. First, the location of the level set contour relative to the lesion is estimated using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN has two convolutional layers for feature extraction, which lead into dense layers for classification. Second, the output CNN probabilities are then used to adaptively calculate the parameters of the active contour functional during the segmentation process. Finally, the adaptive window size surrounding each contour point is re-estimated by an iterative process that considers lesion size and spatial texture. We demonstrate the capabilities of our method on a dataset of 164 MRI and 112 CT images of liver lesions that includes low contrast and heterogeneous lesions as well as noisy images. To illustrate the strength of our method, we evaluated it against state of the art CNN-based and active contour techniques. For all cases, our method, as assessed by Dice similarity coefficients, performed significantly better than currently available methods. An average Dice improvement of 0.27 was found across the entire dataset over all comparisons. We also analyzed two challenging subsets of lesions and obtained a significant Dice improvement of 0.24 with our method (p <0.001, Wilcoxon). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel method for automated morphology delineation and analysis of cell nuclei in histopathology images. Combining the initial segmentation information and concavity measurement, the proposed method first segments clusters of nuclei into individual pieces, avoiding segmentation errors introduced by the scale-constrained Laplacian-of-Gaussian filtering. After that a nuclear boundary-to-marker evidence computing is introduced to delineate individual objects after the refined segmentation process. The obtained evidence set is then modeled by the periodic B-splines with the minimum description length principle, which achieves a practical compromise between the complexity of the nuclear structure and its coverage of the fluorescence signal to avoid the underfitting and overfitting results. The algorithm is computationally efficient and has been tested on the synthetic database as well as 45 real histopathology images. By comparing the proposed method with several state-of-the-art methods, experimental results show the superior recognition performance of our method and indicate the potential applications of analyzing the intrinsic features of nuclei morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a new technique of 3D volume segmentation to be applied in general 3D shapes. This technique, called Three-dimensional Radial Active Contour Model (3D Radial Snakes), generalize the concept of Active Rays and use the idea of rays coming from a central point inside an object of interest to be segmented. This rays lies among a 3D space and are represented by two angles and it's length. The idea of this model is to achieve the edge of the object of interest by the analysis of the information only on the ray (1D). We perform tests in synthetic 3D shapes varying the number of rays and computing the mean distance from the original shape and calculating how similar the shapes are. The obtained results from synthetic volumes show that this method can be applied in image segmentation with good accuracy in a fast way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper proposes a novel approach for image segmentation in case of bio-medical applications. The medical images considered for our analysis are drawn from microarray image databases and they are generally used for the estimation of gene expression levels, which correspond to the average intensities of the microarray spots represented as circular shapes within the image under analysis. The novelty of the proposed image analysis approach consists of a segmentation procedure which uses an active contour model (ACM) based on edge information. Basically, a predefined curve is evolved towards the object edges (i.e. microarray spots). For a precise determination of image object, a cellular neural network approach (CNN) is employed for edge detection of each microarray spot. This is used further on in the curve evolution process for a more accurate segmentation of microarray spots. Specific measures for the characterization of microarray spots features are used to compare the obtained results with the ones delivered by GenePix microarray software platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we undertake a systematic investigation of affine invariant object detection and image denoising. Edge detection is first presented from the point of view of the affine invariant scale-space obtained by curvature based motion of the image level-sets. In this case, affine invariant maps are derived as a weighted difference of images at different scales. We then introduce the affine gradient as an affine invariant differential function of lowest possible order with qualitative behavior similar to the Euclidean gradient magnitude. These edge detectors are the basis for the extension of the affine invariant scale-space to a complete affine flow for image denoising and simplification, and to define affine invariant active contours for object detection and edge integration. The active contours are obtained as a gradient flow in a conformally Euclidean space defined by the image on which the object is to be detected. That is, we show that objects can be segmented in an affine invariant manner by computing a path of minimal weighted affine distance, the weight being given by functions of the affine edge detectors. The gradient path is computed via an algorithm which allows to simultaneously detect any number of objects independently of the initial curve topology. Based on the same theory of affine invariant gradient flows we show that the affine geometric heat flow is minimizing, in an affine invariant form, the area enclosed by the curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, inclusion degree of fuzzy sets is introduced to image segmentation. The image segmentation problem is novelly modeled as the minimization of the overlapping rates between the inside and outside regions, subject to a constraint on the total length of the region boundaries. Considering the similar properties of fuzzy sets and statistical image domain, we use fuzzy membership functions to represent the inside and outside regions and utilize nonparametric density estimates to estimate them. Then, the inclusion degree of fuzzy sets is adopted to formulate the overlapping rates between the inside and outside regions. We solve the inclusion-degree-based optimization problem by deriving the associated gradient flow and applying curve evolution techniques. Experimental results on both synthetic and real images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the previous active contour models formulated to solve the same nonparametric statistical segmentation problem, our method performs well in efficiency and evolution time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background and objective Manual assessment of sperm morphology is subjective and error prone so developing automatic methods is vital for a more accurate assessment. The first step in automatic evaluation of sperm morphology is sperm head detection and segmentation. In this paper a complete framework for automatic sperm head detection and segmentation is presented. Methods After an initial thresholding step, the histogram of the Hue channel of HSV color space is used, in addition to size criterion, to discriminate sperm heads in microscopic images. To achieve an improved segmentation of sperm heads, an edge-based active contour method is used. Also a novel tail point detection method is proposed to refine the segmentation by locating and removing the midpiece from the segmented head. An algorithm is also proposed to separate the acrosome and nucleus using morphological operations. Dice coefficient is used to evaluate the segmentation performance. The proposed methods are evaluated using a publicly available dataset. Results The proposed method has achieved segmentation accuracy of 0.92 for sperm heads, 0.84 for acrosomes and 0.87 for nuclei, with the standard deviation of 0.05, which significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Also our tail detection method achieved true detection rate of 96%. Conclusions In this paper we presented a complete framework for sperm detection and segmentation which is totally automatic. It is shown that using active contours can improve the segmentation results of sperm heads. Our proposed algorithms for tail detection and midpiece removal further improved the segmentation results. The results indicate that our method achieved higher Dice coefficients with less dispersion compared to the existing solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Image & Graphics is the property of Editorial Office of Journal of Image & Graphics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, a fuzzy weighted active contour model for synthetic aperture radar image segmentation is proposed. A feature-based approach comprising weighted active contours and level set segmentation is used to improve segmentation results. A fuzzy inference engine is used to assign weights to pixels of the level set function based on local entropy and local variance. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme improves the segmentation efficiency and accuracy as compared with the existing region-scalable fitting scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Rafadain Engineering Journal is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Quantification of knee meniscus degeneration and displacement in an ultrasound image requires simultaneous segmentation of femoral condyle, meniscus, and tibial plateau in order to determine the area and the position of the meniscus. In this paper, we present an active contour for image segmentation that uses scalable local regional information on expandable kernel (LREK). It includes using a strategy to adapt the size of a local window in order to avoid being confined locally in a homogeneous region during the segmentation process. We also provide a multiple active contours framework called multiple LREK (MLREK) to deal with multiple object segmentation without merging and overlapping between the neighboring contours in the shared boundaries of separate regions. We compare its performance to other existing active contour models and show an improvement offered by our model. We then investigate the choice of various parameters in the proposed framework in response to the segmentation outcome. Dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance measures over a set of real knee meniscus ultrasound images indicate a potential application of MLREK for assessment of knee meniscus degeneration and displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a fast multiphase image segmentation model in a variational level set formulation. The proposed model is mainly used for images with inhomogeneity. The newly defined energy functional combines the local intensity information, the global intensity information, and the edge information to deal with the inhomogeneity. We use a weight function varying with locations to control the force of the local and global information dynamically. The special structure of the new energy functional ensures that the split Bregman method can be used for fast minimization. We apply the split Bregman method to minimize the new energy functional and summarize important results in several theorems. Theoretical evidences for these results are given. Several numerical results are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A perfect knowledge of a defect shape is determinant for the analysis step in automatic radiographic inspection. Image segmentation is carried out on radiographic images and extract defects indications. This paper deals with weld defect delineation in radiographic images. The proposed method is based on a new statistics-based explicit active contour. An association of local and global modeling of the image pixels intensities is used to push the model to the desired boundaries. Furthermore, other strategies are proposed to accelerate its evolution and make the convergence speed depending only on the defect size as selecting a band around the active contour curve. The experimental results are very promising, since experiments on synthetic and radiographic images show the ability of the proposed model to extract a piece-wise homogenous object from very inhomogeneous background, even in a bad quality image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water permeability of the plasma membrane plays an important role in making optimal cryopreservation protocols for different types of cells. To quantify water permeability effectively, automated cell volume segmentation during freezing is necessary. Unfortunately, there exists so far no efficient and accurate segmentation method to handle this kind of image processing task gracefully. The existence of extracellular ice and variable background present significant challenges for most traditional segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reliably extract cells from the extracellular ice, which attaches to or surrounds cells. Our method operates on temporal image sequences and is composed of two steps. First, for each image from the sequence, a greedy search strategy is employed to track approximate locations of cells in motion. Second, we utilize a localized competitive active contour model to obtain the contour of each cell. Based on the first step's result, the initial contour for level set evolution can be determined appropriately, thus considerably easing the pain of initialization for an active contour model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and effective in segmenting cells during freezing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the paper a contour ensemble image segmentation concept is presented. It bases on the previously observed relationship between contours and classifiers. Because of the specificity of the active contour segmentation the method requires a special procedure to obtain ensemble members with desired properties. In this work it is achieved by early stopping of randomized optimization algorithm. The results of the method are illustrated with a practical problem of heart ventricle segmentation by means of active potential contours. Automatically found contours may be of use in a process of pulmonary embolism diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a promising imaging technique used by ophthalmologists to diagnose diseases. Since retinal morphology can be identified on these images, several image processing-based methods are emerging with the purpose of extracting their information. The first step to tackle any automatic method to extract pathological features from these images is delimiting retinal layers automatically. This is the aim of this paper, which presents an active contour-based method to segment layer boundaries in the retina. Results obtained by this method present high accuracy and robustness, even when some of these layers are low defined or vessel shades are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Multiquadric (MQ) quasi-interpolation has been studied extensively in the literature. However, the MQ quasi-interpolant is not well defined for periodic data, since its kernel (the MQ function) itself is not periodic. Note that in many applications, the data may arise from a closed curve (surface) and thus possess some kind of periodicity, for example, analysis of geodetic and meteorological data, constructing active contours, estimating the region of attraction of dynamical systems, and so on. Therefore, it is meaningful to construct a quasi-interpolant (whose kernel itself is periodic) for periodic data. Combining the construction techniques of the MQ quasi-interpolant and the trigonometric B-spline quasi-interpolant, the paper constructs such a quasi-interpolant. The quasi-interpolant couples together the periodicity of the trigonometric B-spline quasi-interpolant and the smoothness of the MQ quasi-interpolant. Moreover, both the quasi-interpolant and its derivatives are periodic. The quasi-interpolant covers the trigonometric B-spline quasi-interpolant as a special case. In addition, the error estimate shows that a proper shape parameter can be chosen such that the quasi-interpolant provides the same approximation order as a trigonometric B-spline quasi-interpolant for a periodic function. Furthermore, the quasi-interpolant gives better approximations to high-order derivatives than the trigonometric B-spline quasi-interpolant, as illustrated by numerical examples presented at the end of the paper. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

For the presence of speckles, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation is often acknowledged as a difficult problem. Large efforts have been done to cope with the influence of speckleson image segmentation. However, it is still an open problem. This paper proposes a method based on well-initialized active contours of the Chan–Vese model. First, Gabor filter banks are used to efficiently suppress the speckles, which simultaneously modify distributions into the ones with several local symmetrical peaks. Then, such modified distributions are described with Gaussian mixture models, the parameters of which are estimated using the expectation maximization algorithm. Third, pixels in filtered images are classified according to their probability of belonging to each Gaussian distribution, and the results are used to initialize the active contours of the Chan–Vese model, which are conducted on the unfiltered SAR images. Experimental results with simulated images and real SAR images validated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed segmentation method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract In this paper, we propose a new convex variational model for segmentation of vector valued images. The data term of the proposed model is based on the coefficient of variation, which works well in vector valued images having intensity inhomogeneity. Due to convexity of the model, it is independent of the placement of initial contour. Better performance of the proposed model can be seen from experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively. Images in practice are of large sizes, which makes numerical methods more important. In this paper, we also develop fast and stable numerical methods for solution of partial differential equation arisen from the minimization of the proposed model. We have developed a novel multigrid method based on a locally supported smoother. The proposed method is compared with the existing methods in terms of iterations and CPU time for vector valued images having large sizes.

The similarity of foreground and background is a tough question in image segmentation. Based on the active contours,combining with the depth map, this paper proposed a depth-assisted region-based active contour method. It used the filtering algorithm to recover the depth map firstly, then calculated the confidence maps of the RGB image and the depth image by Gaussian mixture model. Finally it used the confidence map to calculate the weights of the colors and depths in the given region to guide the segmentation process. The proposed algorithm used the local information of color and depth images to guide the segmentation, which obtained a more accurate segmentation. The experimental results show that the proposed method obtains the segmentation results are nearer to the true circumstance, also it improves the accuracy of image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]