2 research outputs found
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
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