Title :
Variational image segmentation by unifying region and boundary information
Author :
Ecabert, Olivier ; Thiran, Jean-Philippe
Author_Institution :
Inst. fur Nachrichtentechnik, Darmstadt Univ. of Technol., Germany
Abstract :
This paper presents a novel variational image segmentation technique that unifies both geodesic active contours and geodesic active regions. The originality of the method is the automatic and dynamic global weighting of the respective local equations of motion. A new stopping function for the geodesic active contours is also introduced, which proves to have a better behavior in the vicinity of the object boundaries. Instead of minimizing the standard energy functional, we use a normalized version, which strongly reduces the shortening effect, improving thus the coupling with the region model. Results and method effectiveness are shown on real and medical images.
Keywords :
biomedical MRI; boundary-value problems; image segmentation; medical image processing; variational techniques; 2D magnetic resonance images; automatic dynamic global weighting; energy functional; geodesic active contours; geodesic active regions; local equations of motion; medical images; normalized version; object boundaries; real images; region model coupling; shortening effect reduction; stopping function; variational image segmentation; Active contours; Biomedical imaging; Image edge detection; Image segmentation; Level set; Merging; Navigation; Object segmentation; Signal processing; Surgery;
Conference_Titel :
Pattern Recognition, 2002. Proceedings. 16th International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1695-X
DOI :
10.1109/ICPR.2002.1048445