Multi-feature driven active contour segmentation model for infrared image with intensity inhomogeneity

Active contour model is one of the most widely used image segmentation tools at present, but the existing methods only utilize single feature information of image to minimize the energy function, which is easy to cause false segmentations in infrared (IR) images. In this paper, we propose a multi-feature driven active contour segmentation model to handle IR images with intensity inhomogeneity. Firstly, an especially-designed signed pressure force (SPF) function is constructed by combining the global information calculated by global average gray information and the local multi-feature information calculated by local entropy, local standard deviation and gradient information. Then, we draw upon adaptive weight coefficient computed by local range to incorporate the afore-mentioned global term and local term. Next, the SPF function is substituted into the level set formulation (LSF) for further evolution. Finally, the LSF converges after a finite number of iterations and the IR image segmentation result is obtained from the corresponding convergence result. Experimental results demonstrate that the presented method outperforms typical models in terms of precision rate and overlapping rate in IR test images. The code is available at: https://github.com/MinjieWan/MFDACM .