Copyright © 2012 Meng Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An adaptive regularized level set method for image segmentation is proposed. A weighted -Dirichlet integral is presented as a geometric regularization on zero level curve, which is used to diminish the influence of image noise on level set evolution while ensuring the active contours not to pass through weak object boundaries. The idea behind the new energy integral is that the amount of regularization on the zero level curve can be adjusted automatically by the variable exponent to fit the image data. This energy is then incorporated into a level set formulation with an external energy term that drives the motion of the zero level set toward the desired objects boundaries, and a level set function regularization term that is necessary for maintaining stable level set evolution. The proposed model has been applied to a wide range of both real and synthetic images with promising results.