Prior distribution-based statistical active contour model

Employing prior information can greatly improve the segmentation result of many image segmentation problems. For example, a commonly used prior information is the shape of the object. In this paper, we introduce a different kind of prior information called the prior distribution. On the basis of non-parametric statistical active contour model, we add prior distribution energy to build a novel prior active contour model. During the convergence of contour curve, distribution difference between the inside and outside of the active contour is maximized while the distribution difference between the inside/outside of contour and the prior object/background is minimized. Furthermore, in order to improve the computation speed, a method to accelerate the computation speed is also proposed, which significantly relieves the burden of estimating probability density functions. As the experimental results suggest, satisfactory effects can be achieved in the segmentation of synthetic images and natural images via the our algorithm. Compared with the traditional non-parametric statistical active contour model without prior information, our method achieves a distinct improvement in both accuracy and computation efficiency.