Iterative graph cuts for image segmentation with a nonlinear statistical shape prior

Shape-based regularization has proven to be a useful method for delineating objects within noisy images where one has prior knowledge of the shape of the targeted object. When a collection of possible shapes is available, the specification of a shape prior using kernel density estimation is a natural technique. Unfortunately, energy functionals arising from kernel density estimation are of a form that makes them impossible to directly minimize using efficient optimization algorithms such as graph cuts. Our main contribution is to show how one may recast the energy functional into a form that is minimizable iteratively and efficiently using graph cuts.Comment: Revision submitted to JMIV (02/24/13

Robust active contour segmentation with an efficient global optimizer

Active contours or snakes are widely used for segmentation and tracking. Recently a new active contour model was proposed, combining edge and region information. The method has a convex energy function, thus becoming invariant to the initialization of the active contour. This method is promising, but has no regularization term. Therefore segmentation results of this method are highly dependent of the quality of the images. We propose a new active contour model which also uses region and edge information, but which has an extra regularization term. This work provides an efficient optimization scheme based on Split Bregman for the proposed active contour method. It is experimentally shown that the proposed method has significant better results in the presence of noise and clutter

Circulant dissimilarity based shape registration for object segmentation

A shape prior based object segmentation is developed in this paper by using a shape transformation distance to constrain object contour evolution. In the proposed algorithm, the transformation distance measures the dissimilarity between two unaligned shapes by cyclic shift, which is called “circulant dissimilarity”. This dissimilarity with respect to translation and rotation of the object shape is represented by circular convolution, which could be efficiently computed by using fast Fourier transform. Given a set of training shapes, the kernel density estimate is adopted to model shape prior. By integrating low-level image feature, high-level shape prior and transformation distance, a variational segmentation model is proposed to solve the transformation invariance of shape prior. Numerical experiments demonstrate that circulant dissimilarity based shape registration outperforms the iterative optimization on explicit pose parameters, and show promising results and highlight the potential of the method for object registration and segmentation