A Fuzzy Geometric Active Contour Method for Image Segmentation

Danyi LI  Weifeng LI  Qingmin LIAO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E96-D    No.9    pp.2107-2114
Publication Date: 2013/09/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E96.D.2107
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Image Processing and Video Processing
Keyword: 
geometric active contour,  spatial fuzzy clustering,  level set method,  image segmentation,  

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Summary: 
In this paper, we propose a hybrid fuzzy geometric active contour method, which embeds the spatial fuzzy clustering into the evolution of geometric active contour. In every iteration, the evolving curve works as a spatial constraint on the fuzzy clustering, and the clustering result is utilized to construct the fuzzy region force. On one hand, the fuzzy region force provides a powerful capability to avoid the leakages at weak boundaries and enhances the robustness to various noises. On the other hand, the local information obtained from the gradient feature map contributes to locating the object boundaries accurately and improves the performance on the images with heterogeneous foreground or background. Experimental results on synthetic and real images have shown that our model can precisely extract object boundaries and perform better than the existing representative hybrid active contour approaches.