A new deformable contour method

In this paper, a new deformable contour method is presented and tested. The method incorporates several advantages and avoids the disadvantages of both the level set and the non-deterministic deformable contour methods. It takes the level set approach as a core procedure with an enhanced velocity control using a region growing-like function, and the introduction of the non-deterministic approach to generate a set of candidate contours for evaluation by an energy function. The resulting procedure can handle blurred and/or opened contours, and noisy contours in images with a complex structure. The procedure is automatic and rather insensitive to the initial location, and has only one parameter /spl sigma/ to adjust. Local energy minima contours can easily be tuned to attend. Experimental results on human abdominal CT images, brain MRI images, and ultrasound pig heart images are favorably reported.