Mean Shifting Gradient Vector Flow: An Improved External Force Field for Active Surfaces in Widefield Microscopy

Gradient vector flow based snakes are a very common method in biomedical image segmentation. The use of gradient vector flow herein brings some major advantages like a large capture range to strong gradients and a good adaption of the snakes in concave regions. In some cases though, the application of gradient vector flow can also have undesired effects, e.g. if only parts of an image are strongly blurred, the remaining weak gradients will be smoothed away. Also, large gradients resulting from small but bright image structures usually have strong impact on the overall result. To tackle this problem, we present an improvement of the gradient vector flow, using the mean shift procedure and show its advantages on the segmentation of 3D cell nuclei.