Integrating local distribution information with level set for boundary extraction

  • Authors:

  • Lei He;Songfeng Zheng;Li Wang

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information, Computing, and Engineering, College of Science and Technology, Armstrong Atlantic State University, 11935 Abercorn Street, Savannah, GA 31419, USA;Department of Mathematics, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO 65897, USA;School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, PR China

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper presents a general object boundary extraction model for piecewise smooth images, which incorporates local intensity distribution information into an edge-based implicit active contour. Unlike traditional edge-based active contours that use gradient to detect edges, our model derives the neighborhood distribution and edge information with two different region-based operators: a Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based intensity distribution estimator and the Hueckel operator. We propose the local distribution fitting model for more accurate segmentation, which incorporates the operator outcomes into the recent local binary fitting (LBF) model. The GMM and the Hueckel model parameters are estimated before contour evolution, which enables the use of the proposed model without the need for initial contour selection, i.e., the level set function is initialized with a random constant instead of a distance map. Thus our model essentially alleviates the initialization sensitivity problem of most active contours. Experiments on synthetic and real images show the improved performance of our approach over the LBF model.