Coarse-to-Fine Segmentation and Tracking Using Sobolev Active Contours

Recently proposed Sobolev active contours introduced a new paradigm for minimizing energies defined on curves by changing the traditional cost of perturbing a curve and thereby redefining gradients associated to these energies. Sobolev active contours evolve more globally and are less attracted to certain intermediate local minima than traditional active contours, and it is based on a wellstructured Riemannian metric, which is important for shape analysis and shape priors. In this paper, we analyze Sobolev active contours using scale-space analysis in order to understand their evolution across different scales. This analysis shows an extremely important and useful behavior of Sobolev contours, namely, that they move successively from coarse to increasingly finer scale motions in a continuous manner. This property illustrates that one justification for using the Sobolev technique is for applications where coarse-scale deformations are preferred over fine-scale deformations. Along with o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: PAMI
• Authors: Ganesh Sundaramoorthi, Anthony J. Yezzi, Andrea Mennucci
• Keywords: Active Contour, PAMI 2008, Sobolev Active Contours, Traditional Active Contours