Seeded region merging based on gradient vector flow for image segmentation

Human interaction is a crucial restriction of active contour model, or snakes. In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm based on gradient vector flow (GVF) field and watershed-based region merging. Firstly a scalar force field is constructed by minimizing an energy function from the GVF force field. From the scalar field we extract a set of seed points facilely, and get an initial segmentation without doing curve evolution. Then a Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) based region merging algorithm is applied to get the final result. Several experimental results demonstrate that this method is efficient to multiple objects segmentation, and insensitive to noises.