An initialization method for active contour models

The original proposal of Active Contour Models, also called snakes, suffers from the strong sensitivity to the initial contour positions and can not deal with topological changes. Among the works to relieve the topological limitation the T-Snakes and Level Sets have the advantage of been general ones. However, the initialization remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a method to initialize snake models based on a triangulation of the domain and on a field holding global image informations. We use fuzzy connectedness to obtain that field. Then, a piecewise linear approximation of the field is taken and thresholded properly to give a rough notion of the positions of the targets.