Adaptive snakes: control of damping and material parameters

The stability of active contour models or 'snakes' is studied. It is shown that the modification of snake parameters using adaptive systems improves both the stability of the snakes and the boundaries obtained. The adaptive snakes perform better with images of varying contrasts, noisy images, and images with different curvatures along the boundaries. The computational costs at each iteration for the adaptive snakes is still of order (Nu) , where (Nu) is the number of points on the snakes. Comparisons of the results for non-adaptive and adaptive snakes are shown using both computer simulations and satellite images.