Integrating local distribution information with level set for boundary extraction

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.

Department(s)

Mathematics

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvcir.2010.02.009

Keywords

image segmentation, implicit active contour, gaussian mixture model, hueckel edge operator, zernike moments, local distribution fitting, level set without initial contour, piecewise smooth image

Publication Date

2010

Journal Title

Journal of Visual communication and image Representation

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