Multiscale sigma filter and active contour for image segmentation

Image segmentation is essential for image recognition. To achieve image segmentation, it is often desirable to process the image into piecewise smooth regions while preserving or even enhancing important edges. In this paper, we first design a multiscale sigma filter to achieve the above objective. To locate the object more accurately, we then follow the sigma filter processing step and a multiscale active contour method with much simpler implementation than the originally proposed active contour algorithm