Image Segmentation with a Priori Conditions: Applications to Medical and Geophysical Imaging

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method for semi-supervised image segmentation based on geometric active contours. The main novelty of the proposed method is the initialization of the segmentation process, which is performed with a polynomial approximation of a user defined initialization (for instance, a set of points or a curve to be interpolated). This work is related to many potential applications: the geometric conditions can be useful to improve the quality the segmentation process in medicine and geophysics when it is required (weak contrast of the image, missing parts in the image, non-continuous contour…). We compare our method to other segmentation algorithms, and we give experimental results related to several medical and geophysical applications.

Keywords

• image segmentation
• a priori segmentation
• level set method
• geodesic active contour