A generalized asymmetric dual-front model for active contours and image segmentation

The Voronoi diagram-based dual-front scheme is known as a powerful and efficient technique for addressing the image segmentation and domain partitioning problems. In the basic formulation of existing dual-front approaches, the evolving contour can be considered as the interfaces of adjacent Voronoi regions. Among these dual-front models, a crucial ingredient is regarded as the geodesic metrics by which the geodesic distances and the corresponding Voronoi diagram can be estimated. In this paper, we introduce a new dual-front model based on asymmetric quadratic metrics. These metrics considered are built by the integration of the image features and a vector field derived from the evolving contour. The use of the asymmetry enhancement can reduce the risk for the segmentation contours being stuck at false positions, especially when the initial curves are far away from the target boundaries or the images have complicated intensity distributions. Moreover, the proposed dual-front model can be applied for image segmentation in conjunction with various region-based homogeneity terms. The numerical experiments on both synthetic and real images show that the proposed dual-front model indeed achieves encouraging results.