A new snake model based on the coulomb law

An active contour (snake) model, which is derived from Coulomb field of electric charges, is proposed in this paper. The external force of this new snake model, which we called the coulomb field, is computed as a diffusion of the gradient vectors of a binary or grey-level edge map. A modified the form of the Coulomb field is suggested in order to improve the properties of the snake during convergence. Our model shows improved performance over traditional snakes models based on conservative force and other snake models using non-conservative force. Our model has real long-distance external force, i.e. larger capture range and less local minima than that of other parametric active contour models while remaining the ability of moving snakes into boundary concavities.