Shape-Based Active Contours for Fast Video Segmentation

In this letter, we propose a shape-based active contours method for segmentation, based on a piecewise-constant approximation of the Mumford-Shah (M-S) functional. The Chan-Vese (C-V) formalism in a level set framework is used to formulate our method; however no sign distance function (SDF) is employed in the method proposed here. This method has the topology-free segmentation associated with the C-V algorithm and adds faster convergence, less memory requirement and fast re-initialization. These properties make the algorithm very attractive for video segmentation.