• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.313-326
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• 2007

In this paper, an algorithm to reconstruct two orthogonal images into a three-dimensional image is developed in order to measure the bubble size and volume in a two-phase boiling flow. The central-active contour model originally proposed by P. $Szczypi\'{n}ski$ and P. Strumillo is modified to reduce the dependence on the initial reference point and to increase the contour stability. The modified model is then applied to the algorithm to extract the object boundary. This improved central contour model could be applied to obscure objects using a variable threshold value. The extracted boundaries from each image are merged into a three-dimensional image through the developed algorithm. It is shown that the object reconstructed using the developed algorithm is very similar or identical to the real object. Various values such as volume and surface area are calculated for the reconstructed images and the developed algorithm is qualitatively verified using real images from rubber clay experiments and quantitatively verified by simulation using imaginary images. Finally, the developed algorithm is applied to measure the size and volume of vapor bubbles condensing in a subcooled boiling flow.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2001.07d
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• pp.2396-2398
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• 2001

Active contour로 알려져 있는 snake는 반복적인 계산으로 이미지상에서 찾고자 하는 물체의 외곽선에 수렴하는 contour로 이미지 상의 물체의 외곽선으로부터 발생하는 외부 에너지(external energy)와 contour 자체로부터 기인하는 내부 에너지(internal energy)를 최소화하는 방향으로 움직인다. 그러나 물체의 윤곽선으로부터 발생하는 외부 에너지는 찾고자 하는 물체뿐만 아니라 주위의 다른 물체로부터도 발생하므로 만일 추적하고자 하는 물체의 주변에 다른 물체들이 존재한다면 snake은 올바르게 동작하지 않게 된다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 단점을 극복하기 위하여 물체의 색상정보를 이용하는 방식을 제안하였다. 물체의 색상 정보는 물체의 고유한 특성 중의 하나로 본 논문에서는 색상정보를 이용하여 원래의 이미지를 찾고자 하는 물체의 색상과 얼마나 유사한가를 나타내는 확률 이미지로 변환하였다. 이렇게 변환된 확률 이미지 상에서 snake 알고리즘을 적용함으로써 배경의 다른 물체로부터 발생하는 외부 에너지를 효과적으로 제거할 수 있다. 또한 본 논문에서는 물체가 이동함에 따라 변화하는 색상 정보를 지속적으로 갱신함으로써 물체의 추적이 효과적으로 이루어지도록 하였다.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.575-591
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• 2011

We present a novel active contour-based two-pass approach to extract smooth feature regions from a triangular mesh. In the first pass, an active contour formulated in level-set surfaces is devised to extract feature regions with rough boundaries. In the second pass, the rough boundary curve is smoothed by minimizing internal energy, which is derived from its curvature. The separation of the extraction and smoothing process enables us to extract feature regions with smooth boundaries from a triangular mesh without user's initial model. Furthermore, smooth feature curves can also be obtained by skeletonizing the smooth feature regions. We tested our algorithm on facial models and proved its excellence.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
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• 2002.05c
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• pp.215-218
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• 2002

영상 내에 존재하는 객체를 배경에서 분리해내는 영상분할에 대한 연구는 일반적으로 픽셀중심, 에지기반, 영역기반 그리고 모델기반의 영역에서 이루어져왔다. Active Contour 모델은 객체를 영상에서 분리하는 에지기반의 영상분할 방식이다. 전통적인 의미의 Active Contour 모델에서 사용한 그라디언트 함수 기반의 영상추출은 잡영이 많고 객체와 배경간 뚜렷한 경계가 없는 객체를 검출하는데는 그 한계를 보이고 있다. 이런 한계를 극복하고자 제안된 방법이 Mumford-Shah equation과 Lipshitz 함수를 이용한 Chan과 Vese의 Active Contour Model이다. 그런데 이 모델은 잡영이 많고 경계선이 뚜렷하지 않은 영상을 분할하는데는 효과적이나, 불균형적 조명이 있는 영상에서 객체를 분리해 내는데는 한계를 보이고 있다. 본 논문은 이러한 단점을 극복하기 위해 불균형적인 영상을 균일화하는 방법을 Chan과 Vese의 Active Contour 방식을 적용하기 전에 적용 시켜 영상 내 객체를 보다 효과적으로 추출하는 방법을 제안한다.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.55-60
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• 2003

For quantitative analysis of the cardiac diseases. it is necessary to segment the left-ventricle (LY) in MR (Magnetic Resonance) cardiac images. Snake or active contour model has been used to segment LV boundary. However, the contour of the LV front these models may not converge to the desirable one because the contour may fall into local minimum value due to image artifact inside of the LY Therefore, in this paper, we Propose the Preprocessing method using k-means clustering and merging algorithms that can improve the performance of the active contour model. We verified that our proposed algorithm overcomes local minimum convergence problem by experiment results.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.303-311
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• 2003

Since the MPEG-4 visual standard enables content-based functionalities, it is necessary to extract video object from natural video sequences. Segmentation algorithms can largely be classified into automatic segmentation and user-assisted segmentation. In this paper, we propose a user-assisted VOP generation method based on the geometric active contour. Since the geometric active contour, unlike the parametric active contour, employs the level set method to evolve the curve, we can draw the initial curve independent of the shape of the object. In order to generate the edge function from a smoothed image, we propose a vector-valued diffusion process in the LUV color space. We also present a discrete 3-D diffusion model for easy implementation. By combining the curve shrinkage in the vector field space with the curve expansion in the empty vector space, we can make accurate extraction of visual objects from video sequences.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.2839-2852
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• 2013

Context-awareness is an essential part of ubiquitous computing, and over the past decade video based activity recognition (VAR) has emerged as an important component to identify user's context for automatic service delivery in context-aware applications. The accuracy of VAR significantly depends on the performance of the employed human body segmentation algorithm. Previous human body segmentation algorithms often engage modeling of the human body that normally requires bulky amount of training data and cannot competently handle changes over time. Recently, active contours have emerged as a successful segmentation technique in still images. In this paper, an active contour model with the integration of Chan Vese (CV) energy and Bhattacharya distance functions are adapted for automatic human body segmentation using depth cameras for VAR. The proposed technique not only outperforms existing segmentation methods in normal scenarios but it is also more robust to noise. Moreover, it is unsupervised, i.e., no prior human body model is needed. The performance of the proposed segmentation technique is compared against conventional CV Active Contour (AC) model using a depth-camera and obtained much better performance over it.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.17B no.5
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• pp.375-380
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• 2010

Most of previous algorithms of object boundary extraction have been studied for extracting the boundary of single object. However, multiple objects are much common in the real image. The proposed algorithm of extracting the boundary of each of multiple objects has two steps. In the first step, we propose the fast method using the outer and inner products; the initial contour including multiple objects is split and connected and each of new contours includes only one object. In the second step, an improved active contour model is studied to extract the boundary of each object included each of contours. Experimental results with various test images have shown that our algorithm produces much better results than the previous algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2010

Some methods employing the Active Contour Model have been widely used to extract face contour. Their performance, however, depends on the initial position of the model and the coefficients of the energy function which should be reconsidered whenever illumination and environmental condition of an input image is changed. Additionally, the number of points in the contour model should increase drastically in order to extract a fine contour. In this paper, we thus propose a novel approach which extracts face contour by segmenting the face region with threshold values obtained by a histogram analysis technique in the separated region of input image. The proposed method shows good performance under various illumination and environmental condition since it extracts face contour by considering the characteristics of the input image.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1996.10b
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• pp.89-92
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• 1996

In this paper, we developed visual tracking algorithm using double active bar. The active bar model to represent the object can reduce the search space of energy surface and better performance than those of snake model. However, the contour will not find global equilibrium when driving force caused by image may be weak. To overcome this problem. Double active bar is proposed for finding the global minimum point without any dependence on initialization. To achieve the goal, an deformable model with two initial contours in attempted to search for a global minimum within two specific initial contours. This approach improve the performance of finding the contour of target. To evaluate the performance, some experiments are executed. We can achieved the good result for tracking a object on noisy image.