Adaptive contour estimation with genetic algorithms

We introduce a fully adaptive active contour which is based on elliptic Fourier contour description and on the minimum description length (MDL) principle. The proposed technique estimates the order of the contour description (number of Fourier coefficients), and the contour itself. The search is performed by means of a genetic algorithm (GA). Preliminary results are presented for simple synthetic images with a specified pixel distribution, which testify the performance of the proposed scheme. These results are the first step towards a fully unsupervised contour estimation.