Integrating Shape and Texture in DeformabIe Models: from Hybrid Methods to Metamorphs

In traditional shape-based deformable models, the external image forces come primarily from edge or gradient information. Such reliance on edge information, however, makes the models prone to get stuck in local minima due to image noise and various other image artifacts. Integrating region statistics constraints has been a centerpiece of the efforts toward more robust, well-behaved deformable models in boundary extraction and segmentation. In this chapter, we review previous work on the loose coupling of boundary and region information in two major classes of deformable models: the parametric models and the geometric models. Then, we propose a new class of deformable shape and texture models, which we term “Metamorphs”. The novel formulation of the Metamorph models tightly couples shape and interior texture and the dynamics of the models are derived in a unified manner from both boundary and region information in a variational framework.