A Novel Active Contour Model Guided by Global and Local Signed Energy-Based Pressure Force

Active contour models (ACMs) have been widely applied in the field of image segmentation. However, it is still very challenging to construct an efficient ACM to segment images with intensity inhomogeneity. In this paper, a novel ACM guided by global and local signed energy-based pressure force (GLSEPF) is proposed. First, by computing the energy difference between the inner and outer energies of the evolution curve, a global signed energy-based pressure force (GSEPF) is designed, which can improve the robustness to initial curves. Second, a local signed energy-based pressure force (LSEPF) is introduced by computing the pixel-by-pixel energy difference within local neighborhood region, which can handle images with intensity inhomogeneity and noise. Finally, the global image information and the local energy information are used for the global and local force propagation functions, respectively. The global and local variances are used to automatically balance the weights of the GSEPF and the LSEPF, which can solve the problem of setting parameters. Meanwhile, a regularization term and a penalty term are applied to avoid the re-initialization process during iterations and smooth the level set function. Experimental results on different types of images demonstrate that the proposed model is more robust than the popular region-based and mixed ACMs for segmenting images with intensity inhomogeneity and noise. The code is available at: https://github.com/HuaxiangLiu/GLSEPF/.