A Marked Point Process Model Incorporating Active Contours Boundary Energy

Abstract

In this paper we incorporate an active contours energy into the Marked Point Process (MPP) framework. The addition of this energy allows the MPP model to detect objects with irregular shapes. This energy accounts for the elasticity and curvature properties of the detected objects. We employ the balloon method to prevent the contour from stagnating at local minima. We use calculus of variations to evolve each individual contour and we use stochastic multiple birth and death dynamics to optimize the MPP energy function. We demonstrate that our method successfully models components with irregular shape in material images, but the model can be extended to other applications.