From active contours to anisotropic diffusion: connections between basic PDE's in image processing

We present mathematical and qualitative relations between a number of partial differential equations frequently used in image processing and computer vision. We show for example that classical active contours introduced for object detection by Terzopoulos (1988) and colleagues are connected to anisotropic diffusion flows as those defined by Perona and Malik (1990). We also deal with the relation of these flows with shock filters and variational approaches for image restoration.

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