Hybrid Active Contour Based on Local and Global Statistics Parameterized by Weight Coefficients for Inhomogeneous Image Segmentation

Abstract

Image inhomogeneity often occurs in real-world images and may present considerable difficulties during image segmentation. Therefore, this paper presents a new approach for the segmentation of inhomogeneous images. The proposed hybrid active contour model is formulated by combining the statistical information of both the local and global region-based energy fitting models. The inclusion of the local region-based energy fitting model assists in extracting the inhomogeneous intensity regions, whereas the curve evolution over the homogeneous regions is accelerated by including the global region-based model in the proposed method. Both the local and global region-based energy functions in the proposed model drag contours toward the accurate object boundaries with precision. Each of the local and global region-based parts are parameterized with weight coefficients, based on image complexity, to modulate two parts. The proposed hybrid model is strongly capable of detecting region of interests (ROIs) in the presence of complex object boundaries and noise, as its local region-based part comprises bias field. Moreover, the proposed method includes a new bias field (NBF) initialization and eliminates the dependence over the initial contour position. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world images, produced by the proposed model, and comparative analysis with previous state-of-the-art methods confirm its superior performance in terms of both time efficiency and segmentation accuracy.

Keywords

• Active contours
• bias field
• image segmentation
• intensity inhomogeneity
• level set