Chan-Vese Revisited: Relation to Otsu's Method and a Parameter-Free Non-PDE Solution via Morphological Framework

Chan-Vese is an important and well-established segmentation method. However, it tends to be challenging to implement, including issues such as initialization problems and establishing the values of several free parameters. The paper presents a detailed analysis of Chan-Vese framework. It establishes a relation between the Otsu binarization method and the fidelity terms of ChanVese energy functional, allowing for intelligent initialization of the scheme. An alternative, fast, and parameter-free morphological segmentation technique is also suggested. Our experiments indicate the soundness of the proposed algorithm.