A statistical approach to contour extraction based on quantum mechanics
Yangguang Sun, Tian Lan, Xiaowei Fu, Mingyue Ding · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
Contour extraction is a key issue in many medical applications. A novel statistical approach based on quantum mechanics to extract contour of the interested object of medical images was proposed in this paper. The natures of quantum statistical concepts such as the quantum discontinuity and the wave function correspond to the discrete and gray possibility of an image respectively. Contour extraction will be performed by the quantum particle movement, where the particle will be moved forward to the position with high probability density edges in image potential field. Experimental results with medical images demonstrated that the proposed approach has the capability to extract contours with arbitrary initialization and handle topology changes as well as both the inner and outer contours by a single initialization. Keywords: Statistical approach, contour extraction, path integral, quantum mechanics.ing