A fast algorithm for automatic segmentation and extraction of a single object by active surfaces

Segmentation is an important problem in various applications. There exist many effective models designed to locate all features and their boundaries in an image. However such global models are not suitable for automatically detecting a single object among many objects of an image, because nearby objects are often selected as well. Several recent works can provide selective segmentation capability but unfortunately when generalized to three dimensions, they are not yet effective or efficient. This paper presents a selective segmentation model which is inherently suited for efficient implementation. With the added solver by a fast nonlinear multigrid method for the inside domain of a zero level set function, the over methodology leads to an effective and efficient algorithm for 3D selective segmentation. Numerical experiments show that our model can produce efficient results in terms of segmentation quality and reliability for a large class of 3D images.