Detection of Pulmonary Region in Medical Images through Improved Active Control Model

Active contour models have been extensively used to segment, match, and track objects of interest in computer vision and image processing applications, particularly to locate object boundaries. With conventional methods an object boundary can be extracted by controlling the internal energy and external energy based on energy minimization. However, this still leaves a number of problems, such as initialization and poor convergence in concave regions. In particular, a contour is unable to enter a concave region based on the stretching and bending characteristic of the internal energy. Therefore, this study proposes a method that controls the internal energy by moving the local perpendicular bisector point of each control point on the contour, and determines the object boundary by minimizing the energy relative to the external energy. Convergence at a concave region can then be effectively implemented as regards the feature of interest using the internal energy, plus several objects can be detected using a multi-detection method based on the initial contour. The proposed method is compared with other conventional methods through objective validation and subjective consideration. As a result, it is anticipated that the proposed method can be efficiently applied to the detection of the pulmonary parenchyma region in medical images.