SEGMENTATION WITH SHAPE PRIOR USING GLOBAL AND LOCAL IMAGE FITTING ENERGY

In this work, we discuss segmentation algorithms based on the level set method that incorporates shape prior knowledge. Fundamental segmentation models fail to segment desirable objects from a background when the objects are occluded by others or missing parts of their whole. To overcome these difficulties, we incorporate shape prior knowledge into a new segmentation energy that, uses global and local image information to construct the energy functional. This method improves upon other methods found in the literature and segments images with intensity inhomogeneity, even when images have missing or misleading information due to occlusions, noise, or low-contrast. We consider the case when the shape prior is placed exactly at the locations of the desired objects and the case when the shape prior is placed at arbitrary locations. We test our methods on various images and compare them to other existing methods. Experimental results show that our methods are not only accurate and computationally efficient, but faster than existing methods as well.