Multiple Contour Finding and Perceptual Grouping using Minimal Paths

We present a new approach for finding a set of contour curves in an image. We consider the problem of perceptual grouping and contour completion, where the data is a set of points in the image. A new method to find complete curves from a set of contours or edge points is presented. Our approach is based on a previous work on finding contours as minimal paths between two end points using the fast marching algorithm (Cohen et al., 1997). Given a set of key points, we find the pairs of points that have to be linked. The paths that join them complete the initial set of contours and allow us to close them. In a second part, we propose a scheme that does not need key points for initialization. Key points are automatically selected from a larger set of admissible points. We illustrate the capability of our approach to close contours with synthetic examples.