• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.11
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• pp.589-600
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• 2002

Deformable models offer an attractive approach for extracting three-dimensional boundary structures from volumetric images. However, conventional deformable models have three major limitations - sensitive to initial condition, difficult to represent complex boundaries with severe object concavities and protrusions, and self-intersective between model elements. This paper proposes a deformable model that is effective to extract geometrically complex boundary surfaces by improving away the limitations of conventional deformable models. First, the proposed deformable model resamples its elements hierarchically based on volume image pyramid. The hierarchical resampling overcomes sensitivity to initialization by extracting the boundaries of objects in a multiscale scheme and enhances geometric flexibility to be well adapted to complex image features by refining and regularizing the size of model elements based on voxel size. Second, the physics-based formulation of our model integrates conventional internal and external forces, as well as a non-self-intersecting force. The non-self-intersecting force effectively prevents collision or crossing over between non-neighboring model elements by pushing each other apart if they are closer than a limited distance. We show that the proposed model successively extracts the complex boundaries including severe concavities and protrusions, neither depending on initial position nor causing self-intersection, through the experiments on several computer-generated volume images and brain MR volume images.