Minimal-complexity segmentation with a polygonal snake adapted to different optical noise models

Abstract

Polygonal active contours (snakes) have been used with success for target segmentation and tracking. We propose to adapt a technique based on the minimum description length principle to estimate the complexity (proportional to the number of nodes) of the polygon used for the segmentation. We demonstrate that, provided that an up-and-down multiresolution strategy is implemented, it is possible to estimate efficiently this number of nodes without a priori knowledge and with a fast algorithm, leading to a segmentation criterion without free parameters. We also show that, for polygonal-shaped objects, this new technique leads to better results than using a simple regularization strategy based on the smoothness of the contour.