MAC: Magnetostatic active contour model

We propose an active contour model using an external force field that is based on magnetostatics and hypothesized magnetic interactions between the active contour and object boundaries. The major contribution of the method is that the interaction of its forces can greatly improve the active contour in capturing complex geometries and dealing with difficult initializations, weak edges, and broken boundaries. The proposed method is shown to achieve significant improvements when compared against six well-known and state-of-the-art shape recovery methods, including the geodesic snake, the generalized version of gradient vector flow (GVF) snake, the combined geodesic and GVF snake, and the charged particle model.