WaterBalloons: A hybrid watershed Balloon Snake segmentation

In this paper, a new image segmentation technique called WaterBalloons is introduced. It combines both watershed segmentation and the active contour model known as Balloon Snake. The watershed transform has a major problem of over-segmentation. Solutions like region merging, use of markers, use of multi-scales have been proposed. These approaches led to other problems such as under-segmentation. The Balloon Snake in an innovative approach that detects salient objects in an image. But in general snakes are very sensitive to initialization and need user interactions and a priori knowledge of objects to segment. WaterBalloons provide the advantage of reducing watershed over-segmentation problems while preventing under-segmentation and ensure automatic initialization of traditional snakes. In addition, a method for parameter optimization of the proposed hybrid snake is introduced based on energy transitions tracking.