• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.79-87
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• 2005

This paper presents an active contour model for extracting accurate facial regions in complex environments. In the model, a contour is represented by a zero level set of level function φ, and evolved via level set partial differential equations. Then, unlike general active contours, skin color information that is represented by 2D Gaussian model is used for evolving and slopping a curve, which allows the proposed method to be robust to noise and varying pose. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method it was tested with several natural scenes, and the results were compared with those of geodesic active contours. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.2
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• pp.610-614
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• 2006

In this paper the advanced method of geodesic active contours was developed for the task of building detection from aerial and satellite images. Automatic extraction of man-made structures including buildings, building blocks or roads from remote sensing data is useful for land use mapping, scene understanding, robotic navigation, image retrieval, surveillance, emergency management procedures, cadastral etc. A level set method based on a region-driven segmentation model was implemented with which building boundaries were detected, through this curve propagation technique. The essence of this approach is to optimize the position and the geometric form of the curve by measuring information along that curve, and within the regions that compose the image partition. To this end, one can consider uniform intensities inside objects and the background. Thus, given an initial position of the curve, one can determine global, region-driven functions and provide a statistical description of the inside and outside object area. The calculus of variations and a gradient descent method was used to optimize the variational functional by an iterative steady state process. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed processing scheme.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.713-720
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• 2007

In image-guided surgery, automatic bone segmentation of Computed Tomography (CT) images is an important but challenging step. Previous attempts include intensity-, edge-, region-, and deformable curve-based approaches [1], but none claims fully satisfactory performance. Although active contour (AC) techniques possess many excellent characteristics, their applications in CT image segmentation have not worthily exploited yet. In this study, we have evaluated the automaticity and performance of the model of Chan-Vese Multiphase AC Without Edges towards knee bone segmentation from CT images. This model is suitable because it is initialization-insensitive and topology-adaptive. Its segmentation results have been qualitatively compared with those from four other widely used AC models: namely Gradient Vector Flow (GVF) AC, Geometric AC, Geodesic AC, and GVF Fast Geometric AC. To quantitatively evaluate its performance, the results from a commercial software and a medical expert have been used. The evaluation results show that the Chan-Vese model provides superior performance with least user interaction, proving its suitability for automatic bone segmentation from CT images.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.1001-1008
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• 2012

Non-destructive testing (NDT) is a technique used in science and industry to evaluate the properties of a material without causing damage. In this paper we propose a method for segmenting radiographic images of welding in order to extract the welding defects which may occur during the welding process. We study different methods of level set and choose the model adapted to our application. The methods presented here take the property of local segmentation geodesic active contours and have the ability to change the topology automatically. The computation time is considerably reduced after taking into account a new level set function which eliminates the re-initialization procedure. Satisfactory results are obtained after applying this algorithm both on synthetic and real images.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.49-55
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• 2017

Computed tomographic angiography (CTA) is widely used in the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease because it shows not only the whole anatomical structure of the cardiovascular three-dimensionally but also provides information on the lesion and type of plaque. However, due to the large size of the image, there is a limitation in manually extracting coronary arteries, and related researches are performed to automatically extract coronary arteries accurately. As the coronary artery originate from the ascending aorta, the ascending aorta and ostium should be detected to extract the coronary tree accurately. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation for the ostium as a starting structure of coronary artery in CTA. First, the region of the ascending aorta is initially detected by using Hough circle transform based on the relative position and size of the ascending aorta. Second, the volume of interest is defined to reduce the search range based on the initial area. Third, the refined ascending aorta is segmented by using a two-dimensional geodesic active contour. Finally, the two ostia are detected within the region of the refined ascending aorta. For the evaluation of our method, we measured the Euclidean distance between the result and the ground truths annotated manually by medical experts in 20 CTA images. The experimental results showed that the ostia were accurately detected.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2000

Iterative curve evolution techniques are powerful methods for image segmentation. Classical methods proposed curve evolutions which guarantee close contours at convergence and, combined with the level set method, they easily handled curve topology changes. In this paper, we present a new geometric active contour model based on level set methods introduced by Osher & Sethian for detection of object boundaries or shape and we adopt anisotropic diffusion filtering method for removing noise from original image. Classical methods allow only one-way curve evolutions : shrinking or expanding of the curve. Thus, the initial curve must encircle all the objects to be segmented or several curves must be used, each one totally inside one object. But our method allows a two-way curve evolution : parts of the curve evolve in the outward direction while others evolve in the inward direction. It offers much more freedom in the initial curve position than with a classical geodesic search method. Our algorithm performs accurate and precise segmentations from noisy images with complex objects(jncluding sharp angles, deep concavities or holes), Besides it easily handled curve topology changes. In order to minimize the processing time, we use the narrow band method which allows us to perform calculations in the neighborhood of the contour and not in the whole image.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.1117-1124
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• 2007

In this paper, an algorithm that can define the threshold value automatically proposed in order to detect a brain ventricle in MRI brain images. After the wavelet transform, edge sharpness, which means the average magnitude of detail signals on the contour of the object, was computed by using the magnitude of horizontal and vertical detail signals. The contours of a brain ventricle were detected by increasing the threshold value repeatedly and computing edge sharpness. When the edge sharpness became maximal, the optimal threshold was determined, and the detection of a brain ventricle was accomplished finally. In this paper, we compared the proposed algorithm with the geodesic active contour model numerically and verified the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by applying real MRI brain images.