A phase-based active contour model for segmentation of breast ultrasound images

Due to the speckle noises, low contrast and blurry boundaries in breast ultrasound (BUS) images, extraction of the boundaries in BUS images is always a challenging task. To solve this problem, a novel phase-based active contour (PBAC) model is proposed. First, we utilize the local phase information and apply the phase asymmetry approach to form a new edge indicator, which dramatically increases the robustness to intensity inhomogeneous. Then, a novel phase-based edge indicator is incorporated into a various level set formulation with the local region-based segmentation energy. Experiments are performed on both synthetic and real BUS images. The results show that the proposed PBAC model outperforms the state-of-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.