Improved Gradient Vector Flow for robust shape estimation in medical imaging

We propose a improved Gradient Vector Flow (iGVF) for active contour detection. The algorithm herein proposed allows to surpass the problems of the GVF, which occur in noisy images with cluttered background. We experimentally illustrate that the proposed modified version of the GVF algorithm has a better performance in noisy images. The main difference concerns the use of more robust and informative features (edge segments) which significantly reduce the influence of noise. Experiments with real data from several image modalities are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.