Active Contour Method with Locally Computed Signed Pressure Force Function: An Application to Brain MR Image Segmentation

This paper presents a region-based active contour method that embeds both region and gradient information. In the proposed algorithm area term practices a new region-based signed pressure force (SPF) function which utilizes the image local information obtained using the local binary fitted (LBF) energy model. By introducing the SPF function based on local fitted image (LFI), the proposed model is able to segment images with intensity in homogeneities. A Gaussian kernel is used to regularize the level set function which not only regularizes it but also removes the need of computationally expensive re-initialization. The proposed segmentation algorithm is applied to synthetic and real images in order to demonstrate the accuracy, effectiveness, and robustness of the algorithm.