A novel active contour model for serial image segmentation

A novel method for the segmentation of serial images is proposed. In the presented framework, the driving force acts as the attracting term to propel the evolving curve towards the object boundaries, and the adaptive term changes the sign of driving force accordingly. Therefore, the evolving curves can arrive at the desired direction without a requirement for the initial curve to be strictly inside or outside the object. A weighted length term is used to keep the smoothness of curve and penalize the formulation of discontinuities. To prevent the level set function deviating from a signed distance function, a distance rectifying flow is also added to the model; therefore the time-consuming re-initialization procedure is completely avoided. Experiments on both synthetic image and CT serial images demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the method.