A Study of Active Contour Segmentation Models Based on Automatic Initial Contour

Image segmentation is a fundamental and challenging problem in image processing and often a vital step for high level analysis. Due to the active contour model (ACM) need to choose the initial contour for the following evolution, it limited the utilities of this kind of segmentation to a large extent. For the purpose of avoiding the processing of human choosing initial contour, in this paper, we proposed an automatic initial contour choosing algorithm of the input image information. Based on the chosen initial contour, the iterative efficient and the accuracy of segmentation have been improved when the initial contour is incorporated into the local based segmentation framework. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real images are provided to evaluate our method, showing significant improvements on the segmentation accuracy and stability, comparing to the human chosen initial contour, such as LBF and LGIF. © 2015 SERSC.