An Edge Preserving Gradient Vector Flow for Active Contours

Snakes or active contours are widely used in the fields of computer vision and image processing. Gradient vector flow (GVF) is an effective external force for active contours, but it is based on isotropic diffusion and doesn´t take the image structure into account. In this study, a novel external force for active contours, named edge preserving gradient vector flow is proposed for active contours. The gradient information of the image is used in the proposed model. This proposed model has been assessed on different images; experimental results show that the new model provides much better results than GVF snake in terms of noise robustness, weak edge preserving, and concavity convergence.