3D object segmentation using B-Surface

3D object segmentation is important in computer vision such as target detection in biomedical image analysis. A new method, called B-Surface algorithm, is generated for 3D object segmentation. An improved 3D external force field combined with the normalized GVF is utilized. After the initialization of a surface model near the target, B-Surface starts to deform to locate the boundary of the object. First, it overcomes the difficulty that comes from analyzing 3D volume image slice by slice. And the speed of B-Surface deformation is enhanced since the internal forces are not needed to compute in every iteration deformation step. Next, the normal at every surface point can be calculated easily since B-Surface is a continuous deformable model. And it has the ability to achieve high compression ratio (ratio of data to parameters) by presenting the whole surface with only a relatively small number of control points. Experimental results and analysis are presented in this paper. We can see that the B-Surface algorithm can find the surface of the target efficiently. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.