Deformable Contour Method: A Constrained Optimization Approach

In this paper, a class of deformable contour methods using a constrained optimization approach of minimizing a contour energy function satisfying an interior homogeneity constraint is proposed. The class is defined by any positive potential function describing the contour interior characterization. An evolutionary strategy is used to derive the algorithm. A similarity threshold T v can be used to determine the interior size and shape of the contour. Sensitivity and significance of T v and σ (a spreadness measure) are also discussed and shown. Experiments on noisy images and the convergence to a minimum energy gap contour are included. The developed method has been applied to a variety of medical images from CT abdominal section, MRI image slices of brain, brain tumor, a pig heart ultrasound image sequence to visual blood cell images. As the results show, the algorithm can be adapted to a broad range of medical images containing objects with vague, complex and/or irregular shape boundary, inhomogeneous and noisy interior, and contour with small gaps.