A new approach for multiphase piecewise smooth image segmentation

Image segmentation is to separate the image domain into sub-domains according to some optimization rule. Variational level-set image segmentation based on the Mumford-Shah model, together with level set formulation, leads to complicate implementation and expensive computational time. To overcome the difficulty in solving the complex coupled level set functions and handle any number of phases in the image, we improve the region-base active contour model in this paper. We formulate the image segmentation as a new multiphase minimization problem to handle images containing any integer phases of intensities. We also propose efficient numerical algorithms to solve such optimization problem without extra steps of convex relaxation. Numerical validation experiments on various images show better accuracy and robustness over existing methods.