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

Variational Image Segmentation with Constraints

The research of Huizhu Pan addresses the problem of image segmentation with constraints though designing and solving various variational models. A novel constraint term is designed for the use of landmarks in image segmentation. Two region-based segmentation models were proposed where the segmentation contour passes through landmark points. A more stable and memory efficient solution to the self-repelling snakes model, a variational model with the topology preservation constraint, was also designed

First order algorithms in variational image processing

Variational methods in imaging are nowadays developing towards a quite universal and flexible tool, allowing for highly successful approaches on tasks like denoising, deblurring, inpainting, segmentation, super-resolution, disparity, and optical flow estimation. The overall structure of such approaches is of the form ${\cal D}(Ku) + \alpha {\cal R} (u) \rightarrow \min_u$ ; where the functional ${\cal D}$ is a data fidelity term also depending on some input data $f$ and measuring the deviation of $Ku$ from such and ${\cal R}$ is a regularization functional. Moreover $K$ is a (often linear) forward operator modeling the dependence of data on an underlying image, and $\alpha$ is a positive regularization parameter. While ${\cal D}$ is often smooth and (strictly) convex, the current practice almost exclusively uses nonsmooth regularization functionals. The majority of successful techniques is using nonsmooth and convex functionals like the total variation and generalizations thereof or $\ell_1$-norms of coefficients arising from scalar products with some frame system. The efficient solution of such variational problems in imaging demands for appropriate algorithms. Taking into account the specific structure as a sum of two very different terms to be minimized, splitting algorithms are a quite canonical choice. Consequently this field has revived the interest in techniques like operator splittings or augmented Lagrangians. Here we shall provide an overview of methods currently developed and recent results as well as some computational studies providing a comparison of different methods and also illustrating their success in applications.Comment: 60 pages, 33 figure