Quad-edge active contours for biomedical image segmentation

Abstract

We investigate a novel, parallel implementation of active contours for image segmentation combining a multi-agent system with a quad-edge representation of the contour. The control points of the contour evolve independently from one another in a parallel fashion, handling contour deformation, and convergence, while the quad-edge representation simplifies contour manipulation and local re-sampling during its evolution. We illustrate this new approach on biological images, and compare results with a conventional active contour implementation, discussing its benefits and limitations. This preliminary work is made freely available as a plug-in for our open-source Icy platform, where it will be developed with future extensions.