Gradient vector flow fast geometric active contours
Nikolaos Paragios, O. Mellina-Gottardo, Visvanathan Ramesh · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · 2004
In this paper, we propose an edge-driven bidirectional geometric flow for boundary extraction. To this end, we combine the geodesic active contour flow and the gradient vector flow external force for snakes. The resulting motion equation is considered within a level set formulation, can deal with topological changes and important shape deformations. An efficient numerical schema is used for the flow implementation that exhibits robust behavior and has fast convergence rate. Promising results on real and synthetic images demonstrate the potentials of the flow.