Active contours driven by local and global intensity fitting energy with application to SAR image segmentation and its fast solvers

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel variational active contour model based on Aubert-Aujol (AA) denoising model, which hybrides geodesic active contour (GAC) model with active contours without edges (ACWE) model and can be used to segment images corrupted by multiplicative gamma noise. We transform the proposed model into classic ROF model by adding a proximity term. Inspired by a fast denosing algorithm proposed by Jia-Zhao recently, we propose two fast fixed point algorithms to solve SAR image segmentation question. Experimental results for real SAR images show that the proposed image segmentation model can efficiently stop the contours at weak or blurred edges, and can automatically detect the exterior and interior boundaries of images with multiplicative gamma noise. The proposed fast fixed point algorithms are robustness to initialization contour, and can further reduce about 15% of the time needed for algorithm proposed by Goldstein-Osher.