Saliency Snake: A unified framework with adaptive initial curve

Active contour model also known as Snake, is a popular approach for contour extraction and image segmentation. However, some existing active contour models are sensitive to the initial curve, which is usually required to be placed near the true object contour. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel active contour model with adaptive initial curve, namely Saliency Snake. Taking visual saliency into consideration, prior shape information of the interested object is incorporated explicitly into the energy functional of Saliency Snake. Such improvement facilitates active contour evolution and leads to fast and automatic segmentation. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed Saliency Snake can achieve superior segmentation performance both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.