EPFL | Biomedical Imaging Group

Efficient Shape Priors for Spline-Based Snakes

R. Delgado-Gonzalo, D. Schmitter, V. Uhlmann, M. Unser

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 24, no. 11, pp. 3915-3926, November 2015.

Parametric active contours are an attractive approach for image segmentation, thanks to their computational efficiency. They are driven by application-dependent energies that reflect the prior knowledge on the object to be segmented. We propose an energy involving shape priors acting in a regularization-like manner. Thereby, the shape of the snake is orthogonally projected onto the space that spans the affine transformations of a given shape prior. The formulation of the curves is continuous, which provides computational benefits when compared with landmark-based (discrete) methods. We show that this approach improves the robustness and quality of spline-based segmentation algorithms, while its computational overhead is negligible. An interactive and ready-to-use implementation of the proposed algorithm is available and was successfully tested on real data in order to segment Drosophila flies and yeast cells in microscopic images.

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