Automatic Initial Boundary Generation Methods Based on Edge Detectors for the Level Set Function of the Chan-Vese Segmentation Model and Applications in Biomedical Image Processing

Abstract

Image segmentation is an important problem in image processing that has a wide range of applications in medicine, biomedicine and other fields of science and engineering. During the non-learning-based approaches, the techniques based on the partial differential equations and calculus of variation have attracted a lot of attention and acquired many achievements. Among the variational models, the Chan-Vese variational segmentation is a well-known model to solve the image segmentation problem. The level set methods are highly accurate methods to solve this model, and they do not depend on the edges. However, the performance of these methods depends on the level set function and its initial boundary too much. In this paper, we propose automatic initial boundary generation methods based on the edge detectors: Sobel, Prewitt, Roberts and Canny. In the experiments, we prove that among the four proposed initial boundary generation methods, the method based on the Canny edge detector brings the highest performance for the segmentation method. By combining the proposed initial boundary generation method based on the Canny edge detector, we implement the Chan-Vese model to segment biomedical images. Experimental results indicate we obtain improved segmentation results and compare different edge detectors in terms of performance.