Active contours with normally generalized gradient vector flow external force

Gradient vector flow (GVF) is an effective external force for active contours, but its isotropic nature handicaps its performance. The recently proposed gradient vector flow in the normal direction (NGVF) is anisotropic since it only keeps the diffusion along the normal direction of the isophotes; however, it has difficulties forcing a snake into long, thin boundary indentations. In this paper, a novel external force for active contours called normally generalized gradient vector flow (NGGVF) is proposed, which generalizes the NGVF formulation to include two spatially varying weighting functions. Consequently, the proposed NGGVF snake is anisotropic and would improve active contour convergence into long, thin boundary indentations while maintaining other desirable properties of the NGVF snake, such as enlarged capture range, initialization insensitivity and good convergence at concavities. The advantages on synthetic and real images are demonstrated.