Gradient vector flow fast geodesic active contours

Abstract

This paper proposes a new front propagation flow for boundary extraction. The proposed framework is inspired by the geodesic active contour model and leads to a paradigm that is relatively free from the initial curve position. Towards this end, it makes use of a recently introduced external boundary force, the gradient vector field that refers to a spatial diffusion of the boundary information. According to the proposed flow, the traditional boundary attraction term is replaced with a new force that guides the propagation to the object boundaries from both sides. This new geometric flow is implemented using a level set approach, thereby allowing dealing naturally with topological changes and important shape deformations. Moreover the level set motion equations are implemented using a recently introduced numerical approximation scheme, the Additive Operator Splitting Schema (AOS) which has a fast convergence rate and stable behavior. Encouraging experimental results are provided using real images.