Abstract
Extracting the contour of an object in image is one of the main tasks of image processing. Snakes, active deformable contours, are well known as optimizing approach. Practically, the objective function is the potential defined over image plane. The local minima of the potential are interpreted as “attractor” of the snake. Though this interpretation seems quite natural, actual potential function has complicated shape especially near the boundary of an object, because of shadow, blurring as well as noise. So snake is often trapped in a fake equilibrium, and cannot detect edges or curves correctly. We apply stochastic relaxation method to this problem. Our algorithm guarantees that the snake can achieve true equilibrium within selected relaxation range. The efficiency of our algorithm is demonstrated via some examples.
