Anisotropic virtual electric field for active contours

0167-8655/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2008.04.009 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 718 982 3178; fax E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Zhan A novel external force called anisotropic virtual electric field (AVEF) is proposed for active contours by incorporating the geometric information of the image edge map into a virtual electric field (VEF) model. The proposed AVEF model has the advantage of preventing active contours from moving across object boundary’s weak edges with strong neighbors while keeping the desirable properties of the VEF model, such as large capture range and fast computation time. The experiments conducted on synthetic and real images show the high performance of the AVEF model on image segmentation. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.