Interactive image segmentation based on object contour feature image

This paper presents a new interactive image segmentation method. The key idea is to generate the object contour feature image according to a small number of user supplied object contour points, and then adopt the parametric active contour model for object segmentation. An image patch matching with rotation-invariance is utilized to generate object contour feature image. In order to prevent the evolving curve running into local optimal solution, the initial evolving curve of the parametric active contour is constructed by local intensity values of the object contour feature image. Medical image segmentation results indicate that the proposed method is superior to the traditional parametric active contour model, and is an effective semi-automatic image segmentation method.