Advection-enhanced gradient vector flow for active-contour image segmentation

In this paper, we propose a new gradient vector flow model with advection enhancement, called advection-enhanced gradient vector flow, for calculating the external force employed in the active-contour image segmentation. The proposed model is mainly inspired by the functional derivative of an adaptive total variation regularizer whose minimizer is expected to be able to effectively preserve the desired object boundary. More specifically, by incorporating an additional advection term into the usual gradient vector flow model, the resulting external force can much better help the active contour to recover missing edges, to converge to a narrow and deep concavity, and to preserve weak edges. Numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the high performance of the newly proposed model.