A divide and conquer deformable contour method

A divide and conquer strategy in the deformable contour method is presented. An initial inside closed contour is divided into segments, and these segments are allowed to deform separately preserving segments´ connectivity. A deformable contour algorithm is adapted to each contour segment movement. A maximum area threshold, A_max, is used to stop these outward contour segment marchings. Clear and blur contour points are then identified, and the whole contour is repartitioned into clear, blur, and gap segments. A bi-directional searching method is then recursively applied to each, blur, or gap segment until a final contour is sought. At this point, a search for contour within contour segment is undertaken so that the inner most contour can be searched. At all times, a global snake type performance index is used to find each local contour segment. Experiments have shown that the method has the capability of moving a contour into the neighboring region of the solution contour by overcoming all the above inhomogeneous interior, and of adapting each contour segment searching operation to different local difficulties, through a contour partition and repartition scheme in searching for a final solution. These experiments include ultrasound images of pig heart, MRI brain images, and MRI knee images having complex shapes and/or with gaps, inhomogeneous interior and contour region brightness distributions