A combined active contours method for segmentation using localization and multiresolution

Image segmentation is a fundamental step in many image processing applications. To achieve high-quality segmentations active contours are commonly used. However, state of art strategies are not able to provide successful results in all the conditions. Additionally, the strategies that get the best overall results are computationally expensive and need to manually set some parameters, which decreases their usability. Here, we propose a novel active contours-based segmentation method that, through the combination of boundary-based and region-based energies and a multiresolution analysis, provides very high-quality results while significantly increasing both the computational efficiency and the usability of previous approaches.