Modeling prior shape and appearance knowledge in watershed segmentation

Watershed transform is widely used in image segmentation. However, its shortcomings such as over-segmentation and sensitivity to noise often make it unsuitable as an automatic tool for segmenting medical images. Utilizing prior shape knowledge has been demonstrated to improve robustness of medical image segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel method for incorporating prior shape and appearance knowledge into watershed segmentation. Our method is based on iteratively aligning a shape-histogram with the result of an improved k-means clustering algorithm. No human interaction is needed in the whole process. We demonstrate the robustness of our method through segmenting the corpora callosa from a set of 51 brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. Numerical validation of the results is provided.