Towards stabilizing parametric active contours

Numerical instability often occurs in evolving of parametric active contours. This is mainly due to the undesired change of parametrization during evolution. In this paper, we propose a new tangential diffusion term to compensate this undesired change. As a result, the parametrization will converge to a parametrization that is proportional to the natural parametrization which implies that the control points of the contour are uniformly distributed. We theoretically prove that this tangential diffusion term is bounded and therefore numerically stable. Several experiments were conducted and verified the feasibility of the proposed tangential diffusion force.