An Active Contour Model Based On Local Fitted
An Active Contour Model Based On Local Fitted
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Inf Sci (Ny). Author manuscript; available in PMC 2018 January 04.
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Abstract
Active contour models are popular and widely used for a variety of image segmentation
applications with promising accuracy, but they may suffer from limited segmentation
performances due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity. To overcome this drawback, a novel
region-based active contour model based on two different local fitted images is proposed by
constructing a novel local hybrid image fitting energy, which is minimized in a variational level set
framework to guide the evolving of contour curves toward the desired boundaries. The proposed
model is evaluated and compared with several typical active contour models to segment synthetic
and real images with different intensity characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that the
proposed model outperforms these models in terms of accuracy in image segmentation.
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Keywords
Image segmentation; Active contour models; Local fitted image; Level set
1. Introduction
Since the introduction by Kass et al. [12], active contour models [8] have become very
popular in the field of image segmentation in the past years, and can yield closed and
smooth contours of the desired objects with promising accuracy [4]. These models are in
general characterized by a predefined energy functional with intensity and/or gradient
information based on the intrinsic properties of images. This energy functional can be
minimized by using the level set method [17], where contour curves are represented
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implicitly as the zero level set of higher dimensional function. This energy minimization
procedure is effective [6] to drive the motion of contour curves towards the boundaries of
target objects and achieve satisfactory segmentation results for images with different
intensity characteristics.
In the past, a variety of active contour models have been proposed for image segmentation
purpose [1,2,7]. They can be coarsely categorized into the edge- [18,45] and region-based
*
Corresponding authors. [email protected] (J. Pu), [email protected] (X. Yang).
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Edge-based active contour models usually utilize intensity gradients to approximate the
target boundaries and attract contour curves toward desirable boundaries [11]. This type of
models is efficient but sensitive to image noise and the initial curve placement due to the
local characteristic of image gradients. Different from this type of models, region-based
models employ a great deal of image information, such as pixel intensities, shape and texture
features in global or local regions, to make contour curves accurately converge to desirable
target boundaries. The region-based models are in general more robust to image noise, less
sensitive to the initial contour curve placement, and more capable of dealing with weak
boundaries and intensity inhomogeneity owing to the use of more image information, which
in turn causes more segmentation time.
Among region-based models, the Chan–Vese (CV) model [2] has been widely used for many
image segmentation tasks. It assumes that images to be processed have homogeneous
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intensities and can be partitioned into several disjoint subregions according to intensity
characteristics. However, this model may not work well for images with intensity
inhomogeneity due to the mere use of global intensity averages. To accurately segment
inhomogeneous images, a number of region-based models [14,15] have been developed by
constructing a proper energy functional to drive the evolution of contour curves. Li et al.
[14] and Zhang et al. [44] improved the CV model by using the local binary fitting (LBF)
energy and local image fitting (LIF) energy, respectively. Ali et al. [1] developed a
variational model from multiplicative and difference images to handle intensity
inhomogeneity, which turned out to outperform the CV model and its many variants [36].
Mabood et al. [21] proposed an absolute median deviation based model for noisy images,
which was accurate and efficient as compared to the local Chan–Vese (LCV) model [36].
More models can be found in [9,16,30,32] by defining energy functional with other
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information, such as texture features [22,46], prior shape information [3,23,40] and local
patch [35]. With proper initialization, these models are able to successfully extract the
desirable objects depicted on images, but typically need complicated estimation strategies
[10,31].
In this study, we proposed to construct a local hybrid image fitting (LHIF) energy functional
for accurate image segmentation by leveraging the strength of both LBF and LIF models.
Specifically, a novel local fitted image was derived from the LBF and LIF models, aiming to
approximate the square of local image and called square fitted image (SFI). Using this SFI
image, a novel local intensity fitting energy was constructed, together with a regularization
term of level set function. Minimizing this energy functional in a variational level set
formulation will drive contour curves toward the boundaries of desirable objects in an
optimal way. The developed model was validated using a number of synthetic and real
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images as well as medical images. A comparison with several typical active contour models
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2. Related work
2.1. CV model
The CV model can be viewed as a variant of the Mumford–Shah model [16] based on the
assumption of image homogeneity. It partitions a given image into two disjoint subregions
with an initial contour curve C (i.e., inside and outside regions of C, expressed as Cin and
Cout, respectively). The initial curve evolves to the desired boundaries according to the
following energy functional:
(1)
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where constants c1 and c2 are the average intensities for the regions Cin and Cout,
respectively; I(x) denotes the pixel intensity in the position of x. λ1 and λ2 are weighting
parameters for intensity fitting terms, which play a major role in driving the motion of the
contour curve; while υ is the weighting parameter for length penalty term |C|. In calculus of
variations, the level set formulation of the CV model is obtained by minimizing this energy
functional with respect to the level set function ϕ and given by as follows:
(2)
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where δ(·) is the Dirac function; div(·) and ∇ are the divergence and gradient operator,
respectively. c1 and c2 are computed according to the following formulations:
(3)
where H1(ϕ) = H(ϕ) and H2(ϕ) = 1 − H(ϕ) are used to identify the internal and external
regions of ϕ; is the smooth Heaviside function [39] with a small
positive constant ε, and its derivative is the Dirac function .
In the CV model, the differences between c1 and c2 should be large enough to attract contour
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curves to the desired boundaries according to the assumption of image homogeneity. When
image intensities are not homogeneous, c1 may be approximately equal to c2 in certain
regions, which means that the model loses the capability of identifying the desired objects
and image background, together with boundary leakages and inadequate segmentation.
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To overcome the drawbacks of the CV model, the LBF model [14] was proposed by
introducing a binary fitting energy in a local region specified by a Gaussian kernel, and this
LBF energy can be given by:
(4)
introduction of Kσ(x, y). The other symbols have the same meanings as those mentioned
above in the CV model.
The presence of Gaussian kernel Kσ(x, y) enables the LBF model to identify small intensity
differences in local regions and have the capability of handling intensity inhomogeneity.
Meanwhile, this model can avoid the time-consuming reinitialization step by introducing a
new regularization term to penalize the deviation from a signed distance function [18].
However, this model relies on the initial curve placement to avoid the local minimums of the
energy functional in the presence of severe intensity inhomogeneity due to the localization
property of Gaussian kernel and simple intensity statistical estimation.
The LIF model [44] was proposed by introducing the local image fitting energy with the
local intensity averages mi, i=1,2 based on the piecewise-smooth assumption that image I
can be simply reconstructed by the internal region of m1 and the external region of m2 in a
local region. The LIF energy can be regarded as a constraint of the differences between the
local fitted image and the original image, and expressed as:
(5)
(6)
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(7)
where Ω is the whole image region; ILFI denotes the local fitted image (LFI) for the
approximation of the image I in a local region; m1 and m2 are intensity averages in this
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region defined by Gaussian window Wk with the stand deviation of σ and the radius of k.
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This model is able to achieve similar segmentation accuracy as the LBF model, and needs
less computational time due to the presence of Gaussian smoothing for the level set function
ϕ. However, the LIF model tends to ignore some details in the segmentation of small objects,
because of the usage of the Gaussian smoothing filter, and thereby may suffer from
inadequate image segmentation in the presence of intensity inhomogeneity.
3. Proposed method
To obtain reasonable segmentation performances for inhomogeneous images, we proposed
to construct a novel energy functional by incorporating other valuable information. We
noticed that a local region can not only be divided into two disjoint parts with fi(x) in the
LBF model, but also reconstructed approximately with mi in the LIF model. This means that
the LBF and LIF models can be combined together for image segmentation purpose. The
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combination will result in a novel local fitted image, called square fitted image (SFI) and
quite different from the LFI image, and a novel active contour model, constructed by
defining a local hybrid image fitting (LHIF) energy based on images ISFI, ILFI and I. The SFI
image and LHIF energy are explained in detail in the following.
be expanded as:
(8)
The minimization of the LBF fitting energy is equivalent to approximately minimizing the
formulation of in a local neighborhood centered
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at x, largely ignoring the effect of Gaussian kernel Kσ(x, y), which is mainly used to specify
a local neighborhood. Due to I ≈ ILFI in a local region, this approximation formulation can
be further expressed as , leading to another fitted image
, called square fitted image ISFI. Hence, the minimization of the LBF
fitting energy can be obtained when local intensity average mi satisfying the following two
conditions, i.e., I(x) ≈ ILFI(x) and I2(x) ≈ ISFI(x).
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To take advantage of two local fitted images ISFI and ILFI, a local hybrid image fitting
(LHIF) energy was proposed by quantifying the image differences between original image I
and its two approximated versions, i.e., ISFI and ILFI in terms of Kullback–Leibler
divergence, which can be expressed as:
(9)
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(10)
where λ1 and λ2 are the weighting parameters for the first and second integral terms; ILFI(x)
and ISFI(x) are used to approximate images of I and I2, respectively.
(11)
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where DLFI(x) and DSFI(x) are the residual errors for the approximations of I and I2 and
correlated according to the formulation
(12)
Here, we do not focus on the relationship between these two errors, but on how to minimize
the LHIF fitting energy because when both DLFI(x) and DSFI(x) are small enough and
approach zero, this energy functional can be successfully minimized in theory.
(13)
where μ and υ are the weighting parameters for the signed distance function P(ϕ) and the
length of level set function L(ϕ), respectively.
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This energy functional is minimized by standard gradient descent [41,42]: for a fixed ϕ, E(ϕ)
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(14)
For fixed fi(x), E(ϕ) is minimized with respect to ϕ based on the gradient descent flow (see
Appendix A)
(15)
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(16)
(17)
4. Experiments
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images, which are inhomogeneous. Three randomly chosen initial rectangular contour
curves shown in the first row, can evolve successfully to the boundaries of the desired
objects with different sizes and shapes. According to these evolution results, it can be seen
that our proposed model is capable of accurately segmenting the desired objects from noisy
and inhomogeneous images. Also, our model needs relatively few iterations to drive the
contours to desirable boundaries.
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Fig. 2 shows the segmentation results when applying the developed model to four clinically
medical images with both intensity inhomogeneity and complex image background. As
demonstrated by these examples, our proposed model can accurately identify the boundaries
of all targeted objects based on randomly chosen rectangle initial curves, while successfully
excluding a great deal of undesired background information due to the existence of two
different local information from images ILFI and ISFI. Both of these two fitted images are
capable of effectively highlighting the desirable objects with different texture characteristics,
and significantly reduces the adverse influence of complicated image background in image
segmentation. ISFI demonstrates a unique strength in emphasizing the intensity differences
between the foreground and background of images to be segmented, which can be partly
verified according to the two estimated images of DLFI and DSFI.
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We also quantitatively assessed the performance of these models using the Dice Similarity
Coefficient (DSC) [31] as defined as:
(18)
where ∩ is the intersection operator; N (·) is the number of pixels enclosed set. A is
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1The Matlab source code of LBF, LIF and LGDF algorithms can be found from http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~cmli/, http://
www4.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~cslzhang/ and http://www.unc.edu/~liwa/, respectively.
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According to this metric, the segmentation results of these models, based on images
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displayed in Figs. 1 and 2, were quantified and shown in Tables 1 and 2, respectively.
The quantitative assessments demonstrate that our model has the largest values of DSC for
all test images, the CV and CEM models have the lowest values of this measure due to
absence of local image information. Although the LBF, LIF, LGDF and LRCV models can
segment the desired objects in the presence of intensity inhomogeneity, they are less
accurate than our proposed model. In addition, the computational cost of these models in our
experiments were given in Table 3 for images displayed in Fig. 1. Although our model need
more segmentation time than the CV model for these images due to the existence of various
local information, it is more efficient than the LBF, LIF, LGDF and LRCV models. As for
the CEM model, it is based on the same global information as the CV model, but its
segmentation time varies dramatically with images. In summary, our model has better
segmentation performances than the global and local region-based models, considering both
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We further compared our developed model with available local region-based models (i.e.,
the LBF, LIF, LGDF, and LRCV models) based on publicly available Berkeley segmentation
data set 500 (BSDS500) [24,28]. This dataset consists of a number of natural images and
their ground truth manually generated by different individuals. The performance was
quantitatively evaluated using the probabilistic rand index (PRI) [26], which was given by:
(19)
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where B = {B1, B2, ···, BM} is M ground truths, A = {x1, x2, ···, xN} is the result of a
specified algorithm where a subscript indexes one of N pixels. sij is a membership function,
and set to 1 when pixels i and j belong to the same cluster, and otherwise to 0. qij is the
ground truth probability of pixels i and j belonging to the same cluster. The PRI takes a
value between 0 and 1, with a higher value representing a more accurate segmentation. With
the PRI, the comparative results of all models were displayed in Table 4. 2 As demonstrated
by the results, our model has the highest PRI values for 12 images, along with highest mean
of the PRI.
5. Discussion
5.1. Parameters analysis
Although our proposed model demonstrated a relatively high performance in image
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2The segmentation results of the LBF, LIF, LGDF and LRCV models have already been obtained by Ji et al. [10].
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boundaries; while the second term highlights to some extent the differences of image
intensities in local regions, consequently making it difficult to extract undesired background
regions. To correctly segment desired foreground and avoid undesired background, it is
advisable to set proper values for λ1 and λ2 according to the characteristics of the image
itself, including intensity inhomogeneity, noise level and image contrast. For example, (λ1,
λ2) are set to (0.85, 0.1), (1.0, 0.1) and (1.0, 0.25) respectively for the segmentations of
images shown in Fig. 4. Their segmentation results demonstrate that our proposed model is
relatively stable when solely changing the parameter λ1 in a small range, but unstable when
changing the parameter λ2 under the condition of fixing the other parameters. This means
that the first integral term plays greater important part in image segmentation than the
second term; and is more tolerant for the changes of its corresponding weighting parameter.
To estimate our model in terms of sensitivity to initial curve placements and robustness
against noise, it was tested, by keeping all the parameters fixed, for a medical image
displayed in Fig. 5 with different initial curves; and then compared with the LBF, LIF,
LGDF and LRCV models based on the same initial curve for another medical image shown
in Fig. 6, which was normalized and corrupted by Gaussian white noise with zeros mean and
variances of 0.005, 0.01, and 0.015, respectively. The red evolution results presented in Fig.
5 demonstrate that our model has nearly the same results for different initial curves, and
deteriorated performances as noise variances increase according to Fig. 6. These noises
cause some undesirable regions are extracted, together with ignoring small details of target
objects; but these adverse segmented components of our model are tiny compared with the
whole segmentation results. This means that our model is insensitive to initial curve
placements due to the local information from both ILFI and ISFI, and robust to some extent
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against Gaussian white noise in segmentation, relative to other existing models shown in
Fig. 6.
6. Conclusions
In this study, a novel region-based active contour model was developed for accurate image
segmentation. Its novelty lies in the introduction of a novel local hybrid region intensity
fitting energy based on the LBF and LIF models, and this energy functional was constructed
by using the original image and its two local fitted versions drawning upon the concept of
Kullback–Leibler divergence, and minimized in a variational level set framework to drive the
motion of the contour curves to desirable boundaries. Experiments demonstrate that our
proposed model is capable of segmenting synthetic and real images, as well as clinically
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medical images, and has a relatively higher performance as compared to available region-
based models.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported, in part, by Chinese Academy of Sciences Research, Development Equipment Project (Grant
No.YZ201313, YZ201445), National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No.11505281), National Institutes of
Health (NIH) (Grant No.R21CA197493, R01HL096613).
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The minimization of energy functional E(ϕ) is equal to search for the steady-state solution of
the following gradient flow formulation:
where is the Gateaux derivative [37,38,43] of E(ϕ) with respect to ϕ. In our proposed
model, the derivations of regularization terms of ϕ in Eq. (12) have been already analyzed in
previous paper [33], we only need to solve the derivative of ELHIF in the manner: ϕ̃ = ϕ + ηϱ
with a small variation η. Fixing fi(x), i = 1, 2 and letting ϱ → 0, we have
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Combining the derivative of all the three terms in our proposed model, the total variational
formulation of ϕ is as below
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Fig. 1.
The segmentation results of the proposed model for both synthetic and real images displayed
in different columns by changing default parameter values (i.e., σ = 5, Δt = 0. 01, ε = 1. 0
and υ = 0.0085 × 255 × 255 for the first image; σ = 5 and ε = 5 for the second image, λ2 =
0.05, σ = 7, Δt = 0.01 and ε = 7 for the third image). Row 1: initial rectangle contours and
their final evolutions. Row 2 and Row 3: intermediate results with 50 and 100 iterations,
respectively.
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Fig. 2.
The segmentation results of our proposed model for four medical images by replacing
several default parameter values from left to right (i.e., λ2 = 0.07, σ = 5, Δt = 0.01 and ε =
1.0 for the first image; σ = 19, Δt = 0.01 and ε = 7 for the second image; σ = 5, Δt = 0.35
and ε = 1 for the third image; and σ = 8, Δt = 0.01 and ε = 1 for the last image). Row 1:
initial rectangle contours and their final evolutions. Row 2 and Row 3: fitted images ILFI and
DLFI. Row 4 and Row 5: fitted images ISFI and DSFI.
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Fig. 3.
Comparisons of the CV, LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV, CEM and our models for the segmentation
of four images displayed in different columns based on the same initial green contour
curves. Row 1 to Row 7: results of the CV, LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV, CEM and our models,
respectively. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is
referred to the web version of this article.)
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Fig. 4.
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The segmentation results of our model by merely changing (λ1, λ2) to (0.85, 0.1), (1.0, 0.1)
and (1.0, 0.25) for images shown in different columns.
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Fig. 5.
The segmentation results of our models for a real image based on different initial contour
curves. Row 1: initial rectangle contours and their final evolutions. Row 2: the estimated
level set functions.
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Fig. 6.
Comparison of the LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV and our models based on the same green initial
curves for the image corrupted by Gaussian white noise with variances of 0.005, 0.01, and
0.015, respectively. Rows 1–5: the results of the LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV and our models,
respectively. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is
referred to the web version of this article.)
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Table 1
Comparison of our proposed model with the CV, LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV and CEM models based on DSC for
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Table 2
Comparison of our proposed model with the CV, LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV and CEM models based on DSC for clinically medical images shown in Fig. 2.
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Table 3
Comparison of our model and the CV, LBF, LIF, LGDF, LRCV and CEM models in terms of iterations (Iter) and CPU time for synthetic and real images
given in Fig. 1.
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Table 4
Comparison of our model and the LBF, LIF, LGDF, and LRCV models in terms of PRI for randomly chosen 15 images from BSDS500 data set.
Inf Sci (Ny). Author manuscript; available in PMC 2018 January 04.
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