A fast topology changing algorithm of snake for multiple objects boundary detection

Snake is an active contour for representing object contours. Traditional snake algorithms are often used to represent the contour of single object. However, if there is more than one object in the image, the snake model must be adaptive to determine the corresponding contour of each object. In this paper, we present a new snake method for efficiently detecting irregular contours of multiple objects. Our proposed algorithm can provide a straightforward approach for snake contour rapid splitting and connection, which usually cannot be gracefully handled by traditional snakes. The topology changes are automatically implemented. If a single snake contour encloses multiple objects of interest, it will split into two smaller snakes and every contour will repeat the splitting and connecting process in order to capture the boundary of each object. Experimental results of various test images with multiple objects show good performance which proves that the proposed method is both effective and accurate.