Perceptual Organization of Thin Networks with Active Contour Functions Applied to Medical and Aerial Images

13th Int’l Conference on Pattern Recognition
ICPR 96, Technical University of Vienna , Austria, (August 25 – 30, 1996)
session A82.3
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This paper describes a new method of perceptual organization applied to the extraction of thin networks on aerial and medical images. The key point of our approach is to consider perceptual grouping as a problem of optimization.
First the quality of a grouping is defined with a class of functions inspired by the energy functions used for active contours optimization (involving curvature, co-circularity, grey levels, and orientation). Such functions can be computed recursively, and optimized from a local to a global level with an algorithm related to dynamic programming.
This is followed by a selection procedure which rates and extracts principal groupings. The validity of our approach is presented with synthetic images, aerial and medical data.