A divide and conquer deformable contour method

A divide and conquer strategy in the deformable contour method is presented. An initial inside closed contour is divided into segments, and these segments are allowed to deform separately preserving segments' connectivity. A deformable contour algorithm is adapted to each contour segment movement. A maximum area threshold, A/sub max/, is used to stop these outward contour segment marchings. Clear and blur contour points are then identified, and the whole contour is repartitioned into clear, blur, and gap segments. A bi-directional searching method is then recursively applied to each, blur, or gap segment until a final contour is sought. At this point, a search for contour within contour segment is undertaken so that the inner most contour can be searched. At all times, a global snake type performance index is used to find each local contour segment. Experiments have shown that the method has the capability of moving a contour into the neighboring region of the solution contour by overcoming all the above inhomogeneous interior, and of adapting each contour segment searching operation to different local difficulties, through a contour partition and repartition scheme in searching for a final solution. These experiments include ultrasound images of pig heart, MRI brain images, and MRI knee images having complex shapes and/or with gaps, inhomogeneous interior and contour region brightness distributions.