Boundary vector field for parametric active contours

Snakes are widely used in the fields of computer vision and image processing. There are a number of shortcomings of the traditional snakes, including the capture range problem and the concave object extraction problem. Gradient vector flow snake enhances the concave object extraction capability. However, it suffers from high computational requirement. In this paper, we present a new external force which is generated by a novel interpolation scheme which reduces the computational requirement significantly, and at the same time, improves the capture range and concave object extraction capability. (c) 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.