Anisotropic virtual electric field for active contours

A novel external force called anisotropic virtual electric field (AVEF) is proposed for active contours by incorporating the geometric information of the image edge map into a virtual electric field (VEF) model. The proposed AVEF model has the advantage of preventing active contours from moving across object boundary’s weak edges with strong neighbors while keeping the desirable properties of the VEF model, such as large capture range and fast computation time. The experiments conducted on synthetic and real images show the high performance of the AVEF model on image segmentation.