Efficient Implementation of the Chan-Vese Models Without Solving PDEs

Efficient implementation methods are proposed for Chan-Vese models. The proposed methods do not require solutions of PDEs and are therefore fast. The advantages of level set methods, such as automatic handling of topological changes, are preserved. These methods utilize region information to guide the evolution of initial curves. Gaussian smoothing is applied to regularize the evolving curves. These algorithms are able to automatically and efficiently segment objects in complicated images. Experimental results show that the proposed methods work efficiently for images without strong noise. However, they still have initialization problems, as do the Chan-Vese models