Shape prior based on statistical map for active contour segmentation

We propose a new method for performing active contour segmentation based on the statistical prior knowledge of the object to detect. From a binary training set of objects, a statistical map describes the possible shapes of the object by computing the probability for each point to belong to the object. This statistical map is treated as a prior distribution and an energy functional is defined such that the object reaches the most probable shape knowing the model. The optimization is done in the level-set framework. Results on both synthetic and medical images are shown.