Shape-based object segmentation with simultaneous intensity adjustment

Abstract

Most segmentation algorithms are based on the assumption of intensity homogeneity within an object. However, in many applications, the object of interest contains more than one homogenous region. Even when the object's shape is known, such object is not effectively extracted. In this paper, we propose a segmentation process for the objects containing 2 homogenous regions. Our method is based on the level set method. We construct the shape model from the set of manually extracted objects. The parameters that represent the shape model are coefficients of PCA basis. Instead of defining a new cost-function based on heterogeneity assumption, we repeatedly form a homogenous region inside the evolving curve and evolve the curve by the level set method. Our experiment on medical images indicated that our method effectively segmented object with one and two homogenous regions. © 2006 IEEE.