A Discrete Reaction-Diffusion Operator for Moving Curves and Edge Detection

Abstract

This paper introduces a discrete reaction-diffusion operator for iterative curve moving. The operator is a linear combination of an average operator and a maximum-minimum operator. It approximates curvature motion and affine motion. Furthermore, it features properties of level set active contours, namely topological changes of the curve are handled automatically and it does not require the initial curve to be situated close to searched objects. The operator presented is stable and simple to program. An application to edge detection is shown