Segmentation by nonlinear diffusion. II

An algorithm that systematically uses nonuniform smoothing to find boundary components in the form of connected, regularized curves is presented. The boundary, represented by a variable continuously defined over the image domain, as well as the smoothing of the image are determined by a nonlinear system of diffusion equations. Nonlinear diffusion is used again to threshold the boundary variable to produce the actual object boundaries. Laplacians of smoothed gradients are the main tool used. Nonuniform smoothing permits the use of multiple smoothings and the use of derivatives of up to order six.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>