Adaptive shape prior in graph cut segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel method to adaptively apply shape prior in graph cut segmentation. By incorporating shape priors in an adaptive way, we introduce a robust way to harness shape prior in graph cut segmentation. Since traditional graph cut approaches with shape prior may fail in cases where parameters for shape prior term are not set appropriately, incorporation of shape priors adaptively within this framework mitigates these problems. To address this issue, we propose to adaptively apply shape prior based on a shape probability map, defined to reflect the need of shape prior at each location of an image. We show that the proposed method can be easily applied to existing algorithms of graph cut segmentation with shape prior, such as level set based shape prior method, and star shape prior graph cut. We validate our method in various types of images corrupted by significant noise and intensity inhomogeneities. Convincing results are obtained.