A Novel Active Contour Model for Image Segmentation and Bias Correction Using Guided Image Filtering Regularization Term

This paper presents a novel active contour model for image segmentation and bias correction in terms of robustness to initialization and intensity inhomogeneity. In our model, the local image intensities are described by Gaussian distributions with different means and variances. The local Gaussian distribution fitting energy with a new guided image filtering (GIF) regularization is proposed. The new guided image regularization not only considers the spatial information, but also utilizes the local image content. So compared with the traditional algorithms, the proposed model is less sensitive to initialization and converges faster. Comparative experiments show the advantage of the proposed method.