An active regions approach for the segmentation of 3D biological tissue

Some of the most successful algorithms for the automated segmentation of images use an active regions approach, where a curve is evolved so as to maximize the disparity of its interior and exterior. But these techniques require the manual selection of several parameters, which make impractical the work with long image sequences or with a very dissimilar set of sequences. Unfortunately this is precisely the case with 3D biological image sequences. In this work we improve on previous active regions algorithms in two aspects: by introducing a way to compute and update the optimum weights for the different channels involved (color, texture, etc.) and by estimating if the moving curve has lost any object so as to launch a re-initialization step. Our method is shown to outperform previous approaches. Several examples of biological image sequences, quite long and different among themselves, are presented.