A Stochastic Flow for Feature Extraction

© 2000 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Presented at the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2000), 05-09 June 2000, Istanbul, Turkey.DOI: 101109/ICASSP.2000.861943In recent years evolution of level sets of two-dimensional functions or images in time through a partial differential equation has emerged as an important tool in image processing. Curve evolutions, which may be viewed as an evolution of a single level curve, has been applied to a wide variety of problems such as smoothing of shapes, shape analysis and shape recovery. We give a stochastic interpretation of the basic curve smoothing equation, the so called geometric heat equation, and show that this evolution amounts to a rotational diffusion movement of the particles along the contour. Moreover, assuming that a priori information about the orientation of objects to be preserved is known, we present new flows which amount to weighting the geometric heat equation nonlinearly as a function of the angle of the normal to the curve at each point