New algorithms for controlling active contours shape and topology

Abstract

In recent years, the field of active-contour based image seg-mentation have seen the emergence of two competing approaches. The first and oldest approach represents active contours in an explicit (or parametric) manner corresponding to the Lagrangian formulation. The second approach represent active contours in an implicit manner corresponding to the Eulerian framework. After comparing these two approaches, we describe several new topological and physical constraints applied on parametric active contours in order to combine the advantages of these two contour representations. We introduce three key algorithms for independently controlling active contour parameterization, shape and topology. We compare our result to the level-set method and show similar results with a signficant speed-up. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.