Frequency-tuned ACM for biomedical image segmentation

Biomedical images are usually corrupted by strong noise and intensity inhomogeneity simultaneously. Existing region-based active contour models (RACMs) easily fail when segmenting such images. In the frequency domain, we propose a generalized RACM that presents a new way to understand the essence of classical RACMs whose segmentation results are determined by a frequency filter to extract the proposed frequency boundary energy. Then, we introduce the difference of Gaussians as the optimal filter to exclude strong noise and intensity inhomogeneity effectively. We show superior performance of the model by comparing with six state-of-the-art methods on challenge biomedical images and segmenting an optical coherence tomography image sequence.