A New Region-Based Active Contour for Object Extraction Using Level Set Method

Object extraction or image segmentation is a basic problem in image analysis and computer vision. It has been dealt with in various forms. Variational method is an emerging framework to tackle such problems where the aim is to create an image partition that follows the data while at the same time preserving certain regularity. In this paper, we propose a new energy functional which is based on the region information of an image. The region-based force makes our variational flow robust to noise and provides a global segmentation criterion. Furthermore, our method is implemented using level set theory, which makes it easy to deal with topological changes. Finally, in order to simultaneously segment a number of different objects in an image, a hierarchical method is presented.