Region-based object and background extraction via active contours

In this paper, we propose a region-based model for the object and background extraction with application to the image with thick or complex boundary. Based on region information of the image, we employ two curves to extract the object and background, respectively, regardless of the boundary. The first curve is used to extract the object. Correspondingly, the second curve is used to extract the background. By employing two level set functions to represent the two curves, we propose a new region-based energy functional. In the proposed model, a distance constraint term is incorporated, which effectively avoid that the two level set functions too away from each other and keep their similar shapes well. Besides, we present a penalty term to maintain the accurate computation and stability evolution. Experiment results demonstrate the desirable performance of the proposed model with application to synthetic and real-world images. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.