Abstract
Active contour models have achieved prominent success in the area of image segmentation, allowing complex objects to be segmented from the background for further analysis. Existing models can be divided into region-based active contour models and edge-based active contour models. However, both models use direct image data to achieve segmentation and face many challenging problems in terms of the initial contour position, noise sensitivity, local minima and inefficiency owing to the in-homogeneity of image intensities. The saliency map of an image changes the image representation, making it more visual and meaningful. In this study, we propose a novel model that uses the advantages of a saliency map with local image information (LIF) and overcomes the drawbacks of previous models. The proposed model is driven by a saliency map of an image and the local image information to enhance the progress of the active contour models. In this model, the saliency map of an image is first computed to find the saliency driven local fitting energy. Then, the saliency-driven local fitting energy is combined with the LIF model, resulting in a final novel energy functional. This final energy functional is formulated through a level set formulation, and regulation terms are added to evolve the contour more precisely across the object boundaries. The quality of the proposed method was verified on different synthetic images, real images and publicly available datasets, including medical images. The image segmentation results, and quantitative comparisons confirmed the contour initialization independence, noise insensitivity, and superior segmentation accuracy of the proposed model in comparison to the other segmentation models.
Highlights
Image segmentation is often used to extract the informative parts from an image that are used for further analysis or understanding
To obtain a better level set based image segmentation model, inspired by the advantages and disadvantages of the above-mentioned level set models, we present a novel saliency-based local image energy called local saliency fitting (LSF) energy, which is computed by embedding saliency into the local image information (LIF) model
We compared the results with related active contour models (CV, local binary fitting (LBF), LIF, and SDREL) and their implementations are publicly available at [49,50,51,52]
Summary
Image segmentation is often used to extract the informative parts from an image that are used for further analysis or understanding. Active contour models are a productive approach for image segmentation, and there are two official types: parametric active contour (e.g, a snake [13]) and geometric active contour (level set based [12]) models. The curve movement of the geometric active contour model is dependent on the geometric parameters rather than the expression parameters. These models can better deal with an instant change in the shape of the curves and are able to increase the range of the application. Depending on the image information, we can further classify these models into edge-based ACMs [15,16,17,18,19] and region-based ACMs[20,21,22,23,24]
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