Anisotropic diffusion analysis of gradient vector flow

作者：Ning Ji Feng^*; Wu Cheng Ke; Jiang Guang; Liu Shi Gang

来源：Journal of Software, 2010, 21(4): 612-619.

DOI：10.3724/SP.J.1001.2010.03523

• Active contour model
• Anisotropic Diffusion
• Diffusion process
• Diffusion speed
• External force field
• Force fields
• Gradient vector flow
• Image Structures
• Laplacian operator
• Local structure
• Normal direction

A new external force field for active contour model, called anisotropic gradient vector flow, is presented to solve the problem that gradient vector flow (GVF) is difficult to enter the indentation. The diffusion term of GVF is the isotropic and highly smooth Laplacian operator with the same diffusion speed along tangent and normal directions. The diffusion of Laplacian operator is actually decomposed into the tangent and normal directions by the local image structures. Diffusion along the tangent direction enhances the edge, while diffusion along the normal direction removes noise and propagates the force field. This paper develops an anisotropic gradient vector flow based on the analysis of diffusion process of GVF along tangent and normal directions. In the proposed method, the diffusion speeds along the normal and tangent directions are adaptively obtained by the local structure of the image. The experimental results show that compared with GVF, the proposed method considering these two diffusion actions can enter long, thin indentation and improve the segmentation.

• 出版日期2010