An adaptive active contour model for highly irregular boundaries

Snake is an active contour model for representing image contours. In this paper, we propose an efficient active contour model which can represent highly irregular boundaries. The algorithm includes an adaptive force along the contour, and adjusts the number of points for the snake according to the desired boundary. A better stopping criterion based on the area of a closed contour is devised. Furthermore, in this method, a contour can break automatically to represent the contours of multiple objects. Experiments show that this method can extract object's boundaries accurately and efficiently. (C) 2000 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.