Genetic snakes for color images segmentation

The world of meat faces a permanent need for new methods of meat quality evaluation. Recent advances in the area of computer and video processing have created new ways to monitor quality in the food industry. In this paper we propose a segmentation method to separate connective tissue from meat. We propose the use of Genetic Snakes, that are active contour models, also known as snakes, with an energy minimization procedure based on Genetic Algorithms (GA). Genetic Snakes have been proposed to overcome some limits of the classical snakes, as initialization, existence of multiple minima, and the selection of elasticity parameters, and have both successfully applied to medical and radar images. We extend the formulation of Genetic Snakes in two ways, by exploring additional internal and external energy terms and by applying them to color images. We employ a modified version of the image energy which considers the gradient of the three color RGB (red, green and blue) components. Experimental results on synthetic images as well as on meat images are reported. Images used in this work are color camera photographs of beef meat.