Skeletally Coupled Deformable Model

Skeletally Coupled Deformable Models

Abstract

Skeletally coupled deformable models (SCDM) is a segmentation technique, that implements a skeletally mediated competition between growing seeds. The initialized seeds grow by a combination of statistic and smoothing forces. In addition, seeds that are adjacent to each other (with no other seeds in between), compete for pixels in between them. This competition enables the seed that better represents a pixel to capture it irrespective of when the seed arrived. This back and forth competition is mediated by the inter-seed skeleton (the skeleton of the background). The skeleton is interpreted as the "predicted" boundary resulting from the growth of the seeds and the desirability of this prediction is used to modulate the growth of seeds. SCDM combines the advantages of seeded region growing which implements a global competition among all initialized seeds, region competition which implements a local competition between adjacent regions, once they contact each other, and curve evolution based bubbles.