NURBS snakes

A new formulation of energy minimising splines, based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) curves, is presented. The existing snake models do not facilitate the local control of their shapes without increasing the number of control points. The introduction of NURBS renders more flexibility into the snake model due to the weighting parameters that are made to adapt according to the curvature of the contour. The proposed snake model was tested on both synthetic and real images; the new model demonstrated more local flexibility than the previous models and is capable of attracting to complex boundaries of the objects with increased accuracy. q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.