Fast marching the global minimum of active contours

Abstract

A new approach of edge integration for shape modeling is presented. It is used to find the global minimum of an active contour model's energy between two points. Initialization is made easier and the curve is not trapped at a local minimum by spurious edges. We modify the energy by including the internal regularization term in the external potential term. Our method is based on the interpretation of the snake as a path of minimal length in a Riemannian metric, or as a path of minimal weighted distance. We then make use of a new numerical method to find the shortest path which is the global minimum of the energy among all paths joining the two endpoints. We show examples of our method applied to real aerial and medical images.