Dual geometric active contour for image segmentation

A dual geometric active contour applied mainly in image segmentation is proposed. Two contours of the dual geometric active contour evolve from the interior and exterior of the segmented object, respectively, to the desired boundary. The inner and outer contours represented by level set functions interact with each other during the evolutions of the active contour to avoid getting in local minima traps of the functional optimizations. The experiments on image segmentation show that the proposed dual geometric active contour can relieve the problem in initialization. (c) 2006 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.