Gradient vector flow fast geometric active contours

In this paper, we propose an edge-driven bidirectional geometric flow for boundary extraction. To this end, we combine the geodesic active contour flow [3] and the gradient vector flow external force for snakes [25]. The resulting motion equation is considered within a level set formulation [19], can deal with topological changes and important shape deformations. An efficient numerical schema is used for the flow implementation that exhibits robust behavior and has fast convergence rate [8], [23]. Promising results on real and synthetic images demonstrate the potentials of the flow.