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An improved `gas of circles' higher-order active contour model and its application to tree crown extraction

Horvath, P.; Jermyn, I.H.; Kato, Z.; Zerubia, J.

An improved `gas of circles' higher-order active contour model and its application to tree crown extraction Thumbnail


Authors

P. Horvath

Z. Kato

J. Zerubia



Contributors

Prem K. Kalra
Editor

Shmuel Peleg
Editor

Abstract

A central task in image processing is to find the region in the image corresponding to an entity. In a number of problems, the region takes the form of a collection of circles, e.g. tree crowns in remote sensing imagery; cells in biological and medical imagery. In [1], a model of such regions, the ‘gas of circles’ model, was developed based on higher-order active contours, a recently developed framework for the inclusion of prior knowledge in active contour energies. However, the model suffers from a defect. In [1], the model parameters were adjusted so that the circles were local energy minima. Gradient descent can become stuck in these minima, producing phantom circles even with no supporting data. We solve this problem by calculating, via a Taylor expansion of the energy, parameter values that make circles into energy inflection points rather than minima. As a bonus, the constraint halves the number of model parameters, and severely constrains one of the two that remain, a major advantage for an energy-based model. We use the model for tree crown extraction from aerial images. Experiments show that despite the lack of parametric freedom, the new model performs better than the old, and much better than a classical active contour.

Citation

Horvath, P., Jermyn, I., Kato, Z., & Zerubia, J. (2006). An improved `gas of circles' higher-order active contour model and its application to tree crown extraction. In P. K. Kalra, & S. Peleg (Eds.), Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing: 5th Indian Conference, ICVGIP 2006, Madurai, India, December 13-16, 2006 ; proceedings (152-161). https://doi.org/10.1007/11949619_14

Conference Name 5th Indian Conference Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP 2006)
Conference Location Madurai
Publication Date Dec 1, 2006
Deposit Date Aug 12, 2011
Publicly Available Date Apr 22, 2016
Publisher Springer Verlag
Pages 152-161
Series Title Lecture notes in computer science
Series Number 4338
Book Title Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing: 5th Indian Conference, ICVGIP 2006, Madurai, India, December 13-16, 2006 ; proceedings.
ISBN 9783540683018
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/11949619_14
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1678587

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