A novel non-local geodesic active contour model

In this paper we propose a novel variational model by combining the non-local information and the geodesic active contour model, and make use of the non-local information between patches in the neighborhood of interested pixel which is large enough. We define a non-local energy in the sense of intensity by summing up the interactions between pairs of patches that may have similar features, where patches with close distance and similar intensity may have larger non-local values. Adjoint with geodesic active contour, we make use of the advantage of edge-detector and region features. In our model, because of patch information, we only need a local homogeneity of features, thus it is less sensitive to noise and initialization than geodesic active contour model.