New Algorithms for Controlling Active Contours Shape and Topology

In recent years the eld of active contour based image segmentation have seen the emergence of two competing approaches The rst and oldest approach rep resents active contours in an explicit or parametric manner corresponding to the Lagrangian formulation The second approach represent active contours in an implicit manner corresponding to the Eulerian framework After comparing these two approaches we describe several new topological and physical constraints ap plied on parametric active contours in order to combine the advantages of these two contour representations We introduce three key algorithms for independently controlling active contour parameterization shape and topology We compare our result to the level set method and show similar results with a signi cant speed up