A Shape-Constraint-Based Active Contour Model

Abstract

An active contour model Snake and its modifications are widely used for image analysis and computer vision problems, especially for object contour extraction. To overcome some drawbacks associated with existing active contour models used for object contour extraction, this paper presents a shape-constraint-based active contour model (SC-ACM) which uses information of the contour shape of the target object to constrain the snake and controls the snake shape when the snake moves at every step, where the object contour shape is assumed to be roughly known a priori. Successful application of the SC-ACM to extraction of contours on real and synthetic images demonstrates its effectiveness.