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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