A multi-scale energy model for active-contour models

In this paper, we present a multi-scale internal energy model for the balloons, which are closed snakes driven by pressure forces. When used to extract fuzzy contours from noisy images, a balloon sometimes goes through gaps on the contour, thus not able to reach equilibrium. We argue that a balloon should be discretized with a scale comparable to sizes of gaps for the internal energy to be effective in performing contour completion. However, using too large a scale will also prevent a balloon from catching necessary details. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-scale internal energy model that has the ability to maintain smoothness at various scales, thus able to perform contour completion for gaps with various sizes without missing any details.