Lennard-Jones force field for geometric active contour

This paper presents a new geometric active contour (GAC) model based on Lennard-Jones (L-J) force field, which is inspired by the theory of intermolecular interaction. Different from conventional gradient based GAC models, the proposed model does not rely on any pre-computed edge map. We take each pixel of image as a particle, and design an L-J force field for GAC model according to interaction between pixels. We introduce a parameter of distance regularization to make the force tunable, and define an energy function for the L-J function to integrate various image features efficiently. A switch parameter c   generates two different characteristics for the L-J force field: in the case of c=0c=0, the force vector flows bi-directionally converge to boundaries, while in the case of c≠0c≠0 a morphological effect is formed. To quantitatively evaluate the proposed force field, we present two criteria: directional uniformity and average amplitude, and compare it with the popular GVF. In addition, we also prove that the so-called electrostatic model is actually a special case of the proposed model.