An Improved Integrated Active Contour Model without Re-Initialization for Vector-Valued Images Segmentation

Abstract

In this paper, an improved variational formulation for active contours model is introduced to force level set function to become fast and stably close to signed distance function, which can completely eliminate the need of the costly re-initialization procedure. A restriction item that is a nonlinear heat equation with balanced diffusion rate is attached to variational Integrated Active Contour (IAC) model on the basis of analysis on regions and edges information from all channels of the valued-vector images, so that the level set evolution segmentation process becomes fast and stable. In addition, more efficient discretization method with spatial rotation-invariance gradient and divergence operator is proposed as numerical implementation scheme. Finally, the experiments on some images have demonstrated the efficiency, accuracy and robustness of the proposed method.