Using Deformable Surfaces to Segment 3-D Images and Infer Differential Structures

In this paper, we generalize the deformable model [4, 7] to a 3-D model, which evolves in 3-D images, under the action of internal forces (describing some elasticity properties of the surface), and external forces attracting the surface toward some detected edgels. Our formalism leads to the minimization of an energy which is expressed as a functional. We use a variational approach and a finite element method to actually express the surface in a discrete basis of continuous functions. This leads to a reduced computational complexity and a better numerical stability.