ISVC 2009: Advances in Visual Computing pp 196-207 | Cite as

Analysis of Numerical Methods for Level Set Based Image Segmentation

  • Björn Scheuermann
  • Bodo Rosenhahn
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5876)

Abstract

In this paper we analyze numerical optimization procedures in the context of level set based image segmentation. The Chan-Vese functional for image segmentation is a general and popular variational model. Given the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation to the Chan-Vese functional the region based segmentation is usually done by solving a differential equation as an initial value problem. While most works use the standard explicit Euler method, we analyze and compare this method with two higher order methods (second and third order Runge-Kutta methods). The segmentation accuracy and the dependence of these methods on the involved parameters are analyzed by numerous experiments on synthetic images as well as on real images. Furthermore, the performance of the approaches is evaluated in a segmentation benchmark containing 1023 images. It turns out, that our proposed higher order methods perform more robustly, more accurately and faster compared to the commonly used Euler method.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. 1.
    Mumford, D., Shah, J.: Boundary detection by minimizing functionals. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, San Francisco, CA, June 1985, pp. 22–26. IEEE Computer Society Press, Springer (1985)Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Chan, T., Vese, L.: Active contours without edges. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 10(2), 266–277 (2001)MATHCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. 3.
    Zhu, S.C., Yuille, A.: Region competition: unifying snakes, region growing, and bayes/mdl for multiband image segmentation. IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 18(9), 884–900 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. 4.
    Cremers, D., Tischhäuser, F., Weickert, J., Schnörr, C.: Diffusion snakes: introducing statistical shape knowledge into the mumford-shah functional. International Journal of Computer Vision 50(3), 295–313 (2002)MATHCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. 5.
    Rousson, M., Brox, T., Deriche, R.: Active unsupervised texture segmentation on a diffusion based feature space. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Madison, WI, pp. 699–704 (2003)Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Cremers, D., Yuille, A.L.: A generative model based approach to motion segmentation. In: Michaelis, B., Krell, G. (eds.) DAGM 2003. LNCS, vol. 2781, pp. 313–320. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    Malladi, R., Sethian, J., Vemuri, B.: Shape modelling with front propagation: A level set approach. IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 17(2), 158–174 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. 8.
    Paragios, N., Deriche, R.: Unifying boundary and region based information for geodesic active tracking. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition., Forth Collins, Colorado, vol. 2, pp. 300–305. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1999)Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Rosenhahn, B., Brox, T., Weickert, J.: Three-dimensional shape knowledge for joint image segmentation and pose tracking. International Journal of Computer Vision 73(3), 243–262 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. 10.
    Zhao, H.K., Chan, T., Merriman, B., Osher, S.: A variational level set approach to multiphase motion. Journal of Computational Physics 127, 179–195 (1996)MATHCrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  11. 11.
    Brox, T., Weickert, J.: Level set based segmentation of multiple objects. In: Rasmussen, C.E., Bülthoff, H.H., Schölkopf, B., Giese, M.A. (eds.) DAGM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3175, pp. 415–423. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    Rousson, M., Paragios, N.: Shape priors for level set representations. In: Heyden, A., Sparr, G., Nielsen, M., Johansen, P. (eds.) ECCV 2002. LNCS, vol. 2351, pp. 78–92. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 13.
    Brox, T., Weickert, J.: A tv flow based local scale estimate and its application to texture discrimination. Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation 17(5), 1053–1073 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. 14.
    Heiler, M., Schnörr, C.: Natural image statistics for natural image segmentation. International Journal of Computer Vision 63(1), 5–19 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 15.
    Shu, C.W., Osher, S.: Efficient implementation of essentially non-oscillatory shock-capturing schemes. Journal of Computational Physics 77, 439–471 (1988)MATHCrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  16. 16.
    Ge, F., Wang, S.: New benchmark for image segmentation evaluation. Journal of Electronic Imaging 16(3) (2007)Google Scholar
  17. 17.
    Cour, T., Yu, S., Shi, J.: Normalized cut image segmentation source code (2004), http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~jshi/software/

Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Björn Scheuermann
    • 1
  • Bodo Rosenhahn
    • 1
  1. 1.Institut für InformationsverarbeitungLeibnitz Universität Hannover 

Personalised recommendations