Robust global and local fuzzy energy based active contour for image segmentation

• It is very difficult to segment images having high intensity inhomogeneity.
• A global and local fuzzy energy based active contour is proposed to detect objects.
• Local energy is generated by using both local spatial and gray/color information.
• It is better for images with high intensity inhomogeneity, noise and blurred edges.
• To speed up the convergence, a level set based optimization is used.

Though various image segmentation techniques have been developed, it is still a very challenging task to design a robust and efficient algorithm to segment (noisy, blurred or even discontinuous edged) images having high intensity inhomogeneity or non-homogeneity. In this article, a robust fuzzy energy based active contour, using both global and local information, is proposed to detect objects in a given image based on curve evolution. The local energy is generated by considering both local spatial and gray level/color information. The proposed model can better deal with images having high intensity inhomogeneity or non-homogeneity, noise and blurred boundary or discontinuous edges by incorporating local energy term in the proposed active contour energy function. The global energy term is used to avoid unsatisfactory results due to bad initialization. In this article, instead of solving the Euler–Lagrange equation, a level set based optimization is used for the convergence. We show a realization of the proposed method and demonstrate its performance (both qualitatively and quantitatively) with respect to state-of-the-art techniques on several images having such kind of artifacts. Analysis of results concludes that the proposed method can detect objects from given images in a better way than the existing ones.

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