Active contours driven by modified LoG energy term and optimised penalty term for image segmentation

Abstract

An active contour model to segment the images is proposed by combining local binary fitting (LBF) energy function and modified Laplacian of Gaussian (MLoG) energy function. A MLoG energy function based on a new boundary indicator function or edge stop function (ESF) is introduced to smoothen the homogeneous regions and enhance the edge information of objects. Also, MLoG energy term with LBF energy term is incorporated to drive the initial contour towards the object boundary. Finally, the penalty term is replaced with a new optimized potential function, which can improve the corresponding speed function. By adding the optimized area energy term, contour position is accelerated towards the object boundary. Further, the addition of MLoG based on new ESF, makes the proposed model insensitive to the initial contour. Experiments are performed on various real images, MS-COCO 2014 train data set images and Segmentation Evaluation Database images shared in Weizmann Institute of Science website. The proposed model provides better segmentation results compared to the other state of the art models in terms of segmentation accuracy, F-score and CPU execution time. Further, experimental results also prove the robustness of the proposed model in terms of contour initialization, intensity inhomogeneity and noise.