Diffusion-Snakes Using Statistical Shape Knowledge.

We present a novel extension of the Mumford-Shah functional that allows to incorporate statistical shape knowledge at the computational level of image segmentation. Our approach exhibits various favorable properties: non-local convergence, robustness against noise, and the ability to take into consideration both shape evidence in given image data and knowledge about learned shapes. In particular, the latter property distinguishes our approach from previous work on contour-evolution based image segmentation. Experimental results confirm these properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]