Geodesic active contours and graph cuts are two standard image segmentation techniques. We introduce a new segmentation method combining some of their benefits. Our main intuition is that any cut on a graph embedded in some continuous space can be interpreted as a contour (in 2D) or a surface (in 3D). We show how to build a grid graph and set its edge weights so that the cost of cuts is arbitrarily close to the length (area) of the corresponding contours (surfaces) for any anisotropic Riemannian metric. There are two interesting consequences of this technical result. First, graph cut algorithms can be used to find globally minimum geodesic contours (minimal surfaces in 3D) under arbitrary Riemannian metric for a given set of boundary conditions. Second, we show how to minimize metrication artifacts in existing graph-cut based methods in vision. Theoretically speaking, our work provides an interesting link between several branches of mathematics-differential geometry, integral geometry, and combinatorial optimization. The main technical problem is solved using Cauchy-Crofton formula from integral geometry. 1.

Combinatorial graph cut algorithms have been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in vision and graphics. This paper focusses on possibly the simplest application of graph-cuts: segmentation of objects in image data. Despite its simplicity, this application epitomizes the best features of combinatorial graph cuts methods in vision: global optima, practical efficiency, numerical robustness, ability to fuse a wide range of visual cues and constraints, unrestricted topological properties of segments, and applicability to N-D problems. Graph cuts based approaches to object extraction have also been shown to have interesting connections with earlier segmentation methods such as snakes, geodesic active contours, and level-sets. The segmentation energies optimized by graph cuts combine boundary regularization with region-based properties in the same fashion as Mumford-Shah style functionals. We present motivation and detailed technical description of the basic combinatorial optimization framework for image segmentation via s/t graph cuts. After the general concept of using binary graph cut algorithms for object segmentation was first proposed and tested in Boykov and Jolly (2001), this idea was widely studied in computer vision and graphics communities. We provide links to a large number of known extensions based on iterative parameter re-estimation and learning, multi-scale or hierarchical approaches, narrow bands, and other techniques for demanding photo, video, and medical applications.

Abstract. In this paper, we report an active contour algorithm that is capable of using prior shapes. The energy functional of the contour is modified so that the energy depends on the image gradient as well as the prior shape. The model provides the segmentation and the transformation that maps the segmented contour to the prior shape. The active contour is able to find boundaries that are similar in shape to the prior, even when the entire boundary is not visible in the image (i.e., when the boundary has gaps). A level set formulation of the active contour is presented. The existence of the solution to the energy minimization is also established. We also report experimental results of the use of this contour on 2d synthetic images, ultrasound images and fMRI images. Classical active contours cannot be used in many of these images.

A number of active contour models have been proposed which unify the curve evolution framework with classical energy minimization techniques for segmentation, such as snakes. The essential idea is to evolve a curve (in 2D) or a surface (in 3D) under constraints from image forces so that it clings to features of interest in an intensity image. Recently the evolution equation has been derived from first principles as the gradient flow that minimizes a modified length functional, tailored to features such as edges. However, because the flow may be slow to converge in practice, a constant (hyperbolic) term is added to keep the curve/surface moving in the desired direction. In this paper, we derive a modification of this term based on the gradient flow derived from a weighted area functional, with image dependent weighting factor. When combined with the earlier modified length gradient flow we obtain a pde which offers a number of advantages, as illustrated by several examples of shape segm...

Active contour and surface models, also known as deformable models, are powerful image segmentation techniques. Geometric deformable models implemented using level set methods have advantages over parametric models due to their intrinsic behavior, parameterization independence, and ease of implementation. However, a long claimed advantage of geometric deformable models—the ability to automatically handle topology changes—turns out to be a liability in applications where the object to be segmented has a known topology that must be preserved. In this paper, we present a new class of geometric deformable models designed using a novel topology-preserving level set method, which achieves topology preservation by applying the simple point concept from digital topology. These new models maintain the other advantages of standard geometric deformable models including subpixel accuracy and production of nonintersecting curves or surfaces. Moreover, since the topology-preserving constraint is enforced efficiently through local computations, the resulting algorithm incurs only nominal computational overhead over standard geometric deformable models. Several experiments on simulated and real data are provided to demonstrate the performance of this new deformable model algorithm.

A geometric approach for 3D object segmentation and representation is presented. The segmentation is obtained by deformable surfaces moving towards the objects to be detected in the 3D image. The model is based on curvature motion and the computation of surfaces with minimal areas, better known as minimal surfaces. The space where the surfaces are computed is induced from the 3D image (volumetric data) in which the objects are to be detected. The model links between classical deformable surfaces obtained via energy minimization, and intrinsic ones derived from curvature based flows. The new approach is stable, robust, and automatically handles changes in the surface topology during the deformation. Index Terms---3D segmentation, minimal surfaces, deformable models, mean curvature motion, medical images. ------------------------ F ------------------------ 1I NTRODUCTION ONE of the basic problems in image analysis is object detection. It can be associated with the problem of boundary detection, when boundaries are defined as curves or surfaces separating homogeneous regions. "Snakes," or active contours, were proposed by Kass et al. in [16] to solve this problem, and were later extended to 3D surfaces. The classical snakes and 3D deformable surfaces approach are based on deforming an initial contour or surface towards the boundary of the object to be detected. The deformation is obtained by minimizing a functional designed so that its (local) minima is at the boundary of the object [3], [33]. The energy usually involves two terms, one that controls the smoothness of the surface and the other that attracts it to the object's boundary. The topology of the final surface is, in general, as that of the initial one, unless special procedures are used to detect possible spli...

Deformable models, which include deformable contours (the popular "snakes") and deformable surfaces, are a powerful model-based medical image analysis technique. We develop a new class of deformable models by formulating deformable surfaces in terms of an Affine Cell Image Decomposition (ACID). Our approach significantly extends standard deformable surfaces while retaining their interactivity and other desirable properties. In particular, the ACID induces an efficient reparameterization mechanism that enables parametric deformable surfaces to evolve into complex geometries, even modifying their topology as necessary. We demonstrate that our new ACID-based deformable surfaces, dubbed "T-surfaces", can effectively segment complex anatomic structures from medical volume images. Keywords---Segmentation, deformable models, deformable surfaces. I. Introduction The imperfections typical of medical images, such as partial volume averaging, intensity inhomogeneities, limited resolution, and i...

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In this paper, we develop a novel region-based approach to snakes designed to optimally separate the values of certain image statistics over a known number of region types. Multiple sets of contours deform according to a coupled set of curve evolution equations derived from a single global cost functional. The resulting active contour model, in contrast to many other edge and region based models, is fully global in that the evolution of each curve depends at all times upon every pixel in the image and is directly coupled to the evolution of every other curve regardless of their mutual proximity. As such evolving contours enjoy a very wide “field of view, ” endowing the algorithm with a robustness to initial contour placement above and beyond the significant improvement exhibited by other region based snakes over earlier edge based snakes. C ○ 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: active contours; curve evolution; snakes; segmentation; gradient flows.

Traditionally, segmentation and registration have been solved as two independent problems, even though it is often the case that the solution to one impacts the solution to the other. In this paper, we introduce a geometric, variational framework that uses active contours to simultaneously segment and register features from multiple images. The key observation is that multiple images may be segmented by evolving a single contour as well as the mappings of that contour into each image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at interleaving segmentation and registration in such a framework.