Lennard-Jones force field for geometric active contour

  • Authors:

  • Zhenglong Li;Qingshan Liu;Hanqing Lu;Dimitris N. Metaxas

  • Affiliations:

  • National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2728, Beijing 100190, PR China;National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2728, Beijing 100190, PR China and Department of Computer Sciences, Rutgers, The State Un ...;National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2728, Beijing 100190, PR China;Department of Computer Sciences, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 110 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019, USA

  • Venue:
  • Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper presents a new geometric active contour (GAC) model based on Lennard-Jones (L-J) force field, which is inspired by the theory of intermolecular interaction. Different from conventional gradient based GAC models, the proposed model does not rely on any pre-computed edge map. We take each pixel of image as a particle, and design an L-J force field for GAC model according to interaction between pixels. We introduce a parameter of distance regularization to make the force tunable, and define an energy function for the L-J function to integrate various image features efficiently. A switch parameter c generates two different characteristics for the L-J force field: in the case of c=0, the force vector flows bi-directionally converge to boundaries, while in the case of c0 a morphological effect is formed. To quantitatively evaluate the proposed force field, we present two criteria: directional uniformity and average amplitude, and compare it with the popular GVF. In addition, we also prove that the so-called electrostatic model is actually a special case of the proposed model.