2,515 research outputs found
Finsler Active Contours
©2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2007.70713In this paper, we propose an image segmentation technique based on augmenting the conformal (or geodesic) active contour framework with directional information. In the isotropic case, the euclidean metric is locally multiplied by a scalar conformal factor based on image information such that the weighted length of curves lying on points of interest (typically edges) is small. The conformal factor that is chosen depends only upon position and is in this sense isotropic. Although directional information has been studied previously for other segmentation frameworks, here, we show that if one desires to add directionality in the conformal active contour framework, then one gets a well-defined minimization problem in the case that the factor defines a Finsler metric. Optimal curves may be obtained using the calculus of variations or dynamic programming-based schemes. Finally, we demonstrate the technique by extracting roads from aerial imagery, blood vessels from medical angiograms, and neural tracts from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imagery
Active Contour Models for Manifold Valued Image Segmentation
Image segmentation is the process of partitioning a image into different
regions or groups based on some characteristics like color, texture, motion or
shape etc. Active contours is a popular variational method for object
segmentation in images, in which the user initializes a contour which evolves
in order to optimize an objective function designed such that the desired
object boundary is the optimal solution. Recently, imaging modalities that
produce Manifold valued images have come up, for example, DT-MRI images, vector
fields. The traditional active contour model does not work on such images. In
this paper, we generalize the active contour model to work on Manifold valued
images. As expected, our algorithm detects regions with similar Manifold values
in the image. Our algorithm also produces expected results on usual gray-scale
images, since these are nothing but trivial examples of Manifold valued images.
As another application of our general active contour model, we perform texture
segmentation on gray-scale images by first creating an appropriate Manifold
valued image. We demonstrate segmentation results for manifold valued images
and texture images
Segmentation and Restoration of Images on Surfaces by Parametric Active Contours with Topology Changes
In this article, a new method for segmentation and restoration of images on
two-dimensional surfaces is given. Active contour models for image segmentation
are extended to images on surfaces. The evolving curves on the surfaces are
mathematically described using a parametric approach. For image restoration, a
diffusion equation with Neumann boundary conditions is solved in a
postprocessing step in the individual regions. Numerical schemes are presented
which allow to efficiently compute segmentations and denoised versions of
images on surfaces. Also topology changes of the evolving curves are detected
and performed using a fast sub-routine. Finally, several experiments are
presented where the developed methods are applied on different artificial and
real images defined on different surfaces
A Novel Active Contour Model for Texture Segmentation
Texture is intuitively defined as a repeated arrangement of a basic pattern
or object in an image. There is no mathematical definition of a texture though.
The human visual system is able to identify and segment different textures in a
given image. Automating this task for a computer is far from trivial. There are
three major components of any texture segmentation algorithm: (a) The features
used to represent a texture, (b) the metric induced on this representation
space and (c) the clustering algorithm that runs over these features in order
to segment a given image into different textures. In this paper, we propose an
active contour based novel unsupervised algorithm for texture segmentation. We
use intensity covariance matrices of regions as the defining feature of
textures and find regions that have the most inter-region dissimilar covariance
matrices using active contours. Since covariance matrices are symmetric
positive definite, we use geodesic distance defined on the manifold of
symmetric positive definite matrices PD(n) as a measure of dissimlarity between
such matrices. We demonstrate performance of our algorithm on both artificial
and real texture images
An Automatic Level Set Based Liver Segmentation from MRI Data Sets
A fast and accurate liver segmentation method is a challenging work in medical image analysis area. Liver segmentation is an important process for computer-assisted diagnosis, pre-evaluation of liver transplantation and therapy planning of liver tumors. There are several advantages of magnetic resonance imaging such as free form ionizing radiation and good contrast visualization of soft tissue. Also, innovations in recent technology and image acquisition techniques have made magnetic resonance imaging a major tool in modern medicine. However, the use of magnetic resonance images for liver segmentation has been slow when we compare applications with the central nervous systems and musculoskeletal. The reasons are irregular shape, size and position of the liver, contrast agent effects and similarities of the gray values of neighbor organs. Therefore, in this study, we present a fully automatic liver segmentation method by using an approximation of the level set based contour evolution from T2 weighted magnetic resonance data sets. The method avoids solving partial differential equations and applies only integer operations with a two-cycle segmentation algorithm. The efficiency of the proposed approach is achieved by applying the algorithm to all slices with a constant number of iteration and performing the contour evolution without any user defined initial contour. The obtained results are evaluated with four different similarity measures and they show that the automatic segmentation approach gives successful results
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
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