Comparing active contours for the segmentation of biomedical images

Application of active contours for image segmentation raises the question of contour representation, i.e. whether to use snakes or level sets. The representation directly affects issues like topology-preservation and energy optimization. In this paper we aim to contribute to the understanding of specific characteristics of contour representations with a detailed comparison of snakes vs. non-PDE level sets. Based on the same energy functional and applied to different kinds of real-world data our experiments show minor differences in segmentation quality, but outline important distinctions regarding implementation, parameter settings and computational effort.