An Unsupervised Multiscale Approach for the Dynamic Contour-based Boundary Detection Issue in Ultrasound Imagery

We present a new multiscale approach for deformable contour optimization. The method relies on a multigrid minimization method and a coarse-to-fine relaxation algorithm. This approach consists in minimizing a cascade of optimization problems of reduced complexity. Contrary to classical multi-resolution algorithms, no reduction of image is applied. The family of defined energy functions are derived from the original (full resolution) objective function, ensuring that the same function is handled at each scale and that the energy decreases at each step of the minimization process. The efficiency and the speed of this approach is demonstrated in the difficult context of the boundary detection of anatomical structures in ultrasound imagery.