Watersnake: Integrating the watershed and the active contour algorithms

In this paper we propose a new segmentation technique by integrating the active contour and the watershed algorithms. The two distinct techniques for image segmentation are combined in a manner to utilize the strenghts of both. The objects obtained by the watershed transform lack in the smoothness of the contours. The accuracy of active contours on the other hand depends upon contour initialization around each object of interest. A new segmentation technique is proposed to eliminate the problems encountered by either method. The watershed-based segmentation on a down-sampled image is used to get the initial contours for the active contour models. The proposed integration will incorporate control of smoothness in watershed, make active contours unsupervised and prevent the snake from getting trapped into local minima.