A principled method for active contour (AC) parameterization remains a challenging issue in segmentation research, with a potential impact on the quality, objectivity, and robustness of the segmentation results. This paper introduces a novel framework for automated adjustment of region-based AC regularization and data fidelity parameters. Motivated by an isomorphism between the weighting factors of AC energy terms and the eigenvalues of structure tensors, we encode local geometry information by mining the orientation coherence in edge regions. In this light, the AC is repelled from regions of randomly oriented edges and guided toward structured edge regions. Experiments are performed on four state-of-the-art AC models, which are automatically adjusted and applied on benchmark datasets of natural, textured and biomedical images and two image restoration models. The experimental results demonstrate that the obtained segmentation quality is comparable to the one obtained by empirical parameter adjustment, without the cumbersome and time-consuming process of trial and error.

This work introduces a novel active contour-based scheme for unsupervised segmentation of protein spots in two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2D-GE) images. The proposed segmentation scheme is the first to exploit the attractive properties of the active contour formulation in order to cope with crucial issues in 2D-GE image analysis, including the presence of noise, streaks, multiplets and faint spots. In addition, it is unsupervised, providing an alternate to the laborious, error-prone process of manual editing, which is required in state-of-the-art 2D-GE image analysis software packages. It is based on the formation of a spottargeted level-set surface, as well as of morphologically-derived active contour energy terms, used to guide active contour initialization and evolution, respectively. The experimental results on real and synthetic 2D-GE images demonstrate that the proposed scheme results in more plausible spot boundaries and outperforms all commercial software packages in terms of segmentation quality.

Parameter adjustment is a crucial, open issue in active contour methodology. Most state-of-the-art active contours are empirically adjusted on a trial and error basis. Such an empirical approach lacks scientific foundation, leads to suboptimal segmentation results and requires technical skills from the end-user. This work introduces a method for automatic adjustment of active contour parameters, which is based on image entropy. In addition, instead of being uniform, the parameter values calculated are spatiallyvarying, so as to reflect textural variations over the image. Experimental evaluation of the proposed method is conducted on thyroid US images, liver MRI images, as well as on real-world photographs. The results indicate that the proposed method is capable of identifying plausible object boundaries, obtaining a segmentation quality which is comparable to the one obtained with empirical parameter adjustment. Moreover, the applicability of the proposed method is not confined on a single active contour variation.

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This paper deals with (both supervised and unsupervised) classification of multispectral Sentinel-2 images, utilizing the abundance representation of the pixels of interest. The latter pixel representation uncovers the hidden structured regions that are not often available in the reference maps. Additionally, it encourages class distinctions and bolsters accuracy. The adopted methodology, which has been successfully applied to hyperpsectral data, involves two main stages: (I) the determination of the pixel’s abundance representation; and (II) the employment of a classification algorithm applied to the abundance representations. More specifically, stage (I) incorporates two key processes, namely (a) endmember extraction, utilizing spectrally homogeneous regions of interest (ROIs); and (b) spectral unmixing, which hinges upon the endmember selection. The adopted spectral unmixing process assumes the linear mixing model (LMM), where each pixel is expressed as a linear combination of the endmembers. The pixel’s abundance vector is estimated via a variational Bayes algorithm that is based on a suitably defined hierarchical Bayesian model. The resulting abundance vectors are then fed to stage (II), where two off-the-shelf supervised classification approaches (namely nearest neighbor (NN) classification and support vector machines (SVM)), as well as an unsupervised classification process (namely the online adaptive possibilistic c-means (OAPCM) clustering algorithm), are adopted. Experiments are performed on a Sentinel-2 image acquired for a specific region of the Northern Pindos National Park in north-western Greece containing water, vegetation and bare soil areas. The experimental results demonstrate that the ad-hoc classification approaches utilizing abundance representations of the pixels outperform those utilizing the spectral signatures of the pixels in terms of accuracy.