A Balanced Phase Field Model for Active Contours

In this paper we present a balanced phase field model that eliminates the often undesired curvature-dependent shrinking of the zero level set, while maintaining the smooth interface necessary to calculate fundamental quantities such as the normal vector or the curvature of the represented contour. The proposed model extends the Ginzburg-Landau phase field energy with a higher order smoothness term. The relative weights are determined with the analysis of the level set motion in a curvilinear system adapted to the zero level set. The proposed level set framework exhibits strong shape maintaining capability without significant interference with the active (e.g. a segmentation) model.