A Bintree Energy Approach for Colour Image Segmentation Using Adaptive Channel Selection

A new hierarchical approach called bintree energy segmentation was presented for color image seg-mentation. The image features are extracted by adaptive clustering on multi-channel data at each level and used as the criteria to dynamically select the best chromatic channel, where the segmentation is carried out. In this approach, an extended direct energy computation method based on the Chan-Vese model was proposed to segment the selected channel, and the segmentation outputs are then fused with other channels into new images,from which a new channel with better features is selected for the second round segmentation. This procedure is repeated until the preset condition is met. Finally, a binary segmentation tree is formed, in which each leaf represents a class of objects with a distinctive color. To facilitate the data organization, image background is employed in segmentation and channels fusion. The bintree energy segmentation exploits color information involved in all channels data and tries to optimize the global segmentation result by choosing the "best" chan-nel for segmentation at each level. The experiments show that the method is effective in speed, accuracy and flexibility.     

Image series segmentation and improved MC algorithm

A semiautomatic segmentation method based on active contour is proposed for computed tomography （CT） image series. First, to get initial contour, one image slice was segmented exactly by C-V method based on Mumford-Shah model. Next, the computer will segment the nearby slice automatically using the snake model one by one. During segmenting of image slices, former slice boundary, as next slice initial contour, may cross over next slice real boundary and never return to right position. To avoid contour skipping over, the distance variance between two slices is evaluated by an threshold, which decides whether to initiate again. Moreover, a new improved marching cubes （MC） algorithm based on 2D images series segmentation boundary is given for 3D image reconstruction. Compared with the standard method, the proposed algorithm reduces detecting time and needs less storing memory. The effectiveness and capabilities of the algorithm were illustrated by ,experimental results.     

Speckle reduction based on contourlet transform using scale adaptive threshold for medical ultrasound image

A new speckle suppression method in contourlet domain was presented. By modeling the subband contourlet coefficients of the ultrasound images after logarithmic transform as generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD), we gave a scale-adaptive threshold in Bayesian framework. Experimental results of both synthetic and clinical ultrasound images show that our method has a better performance on speckle suppressing than the wavelet-based method while well preserving the feature details.