A joint snake and atlas-based segmentation of plantar foot thermal images

The aim of the present study is to propose a new joint segmentation method dedicated to plantar foot thermal images. The proposed method is based on a modified active contour method (Snake) that includes a prior shape information, namely an atlas of the plantar foot contour, as an extra term in the Snake energy function. This term guides the Snake to the targeted contours during the deformation process, by calculating a curvature difference between the Snake curve and the atlas curve of the plantar foot surface. The proposed method was validated using a database of 50 plantar foot thermal images. Results showed the proposed method to outperform the classical Snake method and seven other recent methods. The comparison was done using two evaluation metrics, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and the dice similarity coefficient (DSC). When compared to ground truth, the best average RMSE of 6 pixels and DSC score of 93% were obtained using the proposed method.