Free Boundary Conditions Active Contours with Applications for Vision

Active contours are used extensively in vision for more than two decades, primarily for applications such as image segmentation and object detection. The vast majority of active contours models make use of closed curves and the few that employ open curves rely on either fixed boundary conditions or no boundary conditions at all. In this paper we discuss a new class of open active contours with free boundary conditions, in which the end points of the open active curve are restricted to lie on two parametric boundary curves. We discuss how this class of curves may assist and facilitate various vision applications and we demonstrate its utility in applications such as boundary detection, feature tracking, and seam carving.