A fractional order derivative based active contour model for inhomogeneous image segmentation

Abstract Segmenting intensity inhomogeneous images is a challenging task for both local and global methods. Some hybrid methods have great advantages over the traditional methods in inhomogeneous image segmentation. In this paper, a new hybrid method is presented, which incorporates image gradient, local environment and global information into a framework, called adaptive-weighting active contour model. The energy or level set functions in the framework mainly include two parts: a global term and local term. The global term aims to enhance the image contrast, and it can also accelerate the convergence rate when minimizing the energy function. The local term integrates fractional order differentiation, fractional order gradient magnitude, and difference image information into the well-known local Chan–Vese model, which has been shown to be effective and efficient in modeling the local information. The local term can also enhance low frequency information and improve the inhomogeneous image segmentation. An adaptive weighting strategy is proposed to balance the actions of the global and local terms automatically. When minimizing the level set functions, regularization can be imposed by applying Gaussian filtering to ensure smoothness in the evolution process. In addition, a corresponding stopping criterion is proposed to ensure the evolving curve automatically stops on true boundaries of objects. Dice similarity coefficient is employed as the comparative quantitative measures for the segmented results. Experiments on synthetic images as well as real images are performed to demonstrate the segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency of the presented hybrid method.