Spatio-temporal prior shape constraint for level set segmentation

This paper exposes a novel formulation of prior shape constraint incorporation for the level set segmentation of objects from corrupted images. Applicable to variational frameworks, the proposed scheme consists in weighting the prior shape constraint by a function of time and space to overcome local minima issues of the energy functional. Pose paxameters which make the prior shape constraint invariant from global transformations are estimated by the downhill simplex algorithm, which is more tractable and robust than the traditional gradient descent. The proposed scheme is simple, easy to implement and can be generalized to any variational approach incorporating a single prior shape. Results illustrated with different kinds of images demonstrate the efficiency of the method.