Morphological region-based initial contour algorithm for level set methods in image segmentation

Abstract

Initial Contour (IC) is the essential step in level set image segmentation methods due to start the efficient process. However, the main issue with IC is how to generate the automatic technique in order to reduce the human interaction and moreover, suitable IC to have accurate result. In this paper a new technique which we called Morphological Region-Based Initial Contour (MRBIC), is proposed to overcome this issue. The idea is to generate the most suitable IC since the manual initialization of the level set function surface is a well-known drawback for accurate segmentation which has dependency on selection of IC and wrong selection will affect the result. We have utilized the statistical and morphological information inside and outside the contour to establish a region-based map function. This function is able to find the suitable IC on images to perform by level set methods. Experiments on synthetic and real images demonstrate the robustness of segmentation process using MRBIC method even on noisy images and with weak boundary. Furthermore, computational cost of segmentation process will be reduced using MRBIC.