A Real Time Morphological Snakes Algorithm

Abstract

Active contours, or snakes, are computer-generated curves that move within images to nd out salient image structures like object boundaries. Energy based formulations using a level set approach have been successfully used to model the snake evolution. The Euler-Lagrange equa- tion associated to such energies yields to partial di erential equations (PDE) which are usually solved using level set methods which involve contour distance function estimation and standard methods to discretize the PDE. Recently we have proposed a morphological approach to snake evolution. First, we observe that the di erential operators used in the standard PDE snake models can be approached using morphological operations. By combining the morphological operators associated to the PDE components we achieve a new morphological approach to the PDE snakes evolution. This new approach is based on numerical methods which are very simple and fast. Moreover, since the level set is just a binary piecewise constant function, this approach does not require to estimate a contour distance function to de ne the level set. In this paper we present an algorithm to compute morphological snake evolution in real time.