Morphological snakes

Abstract

We introduce a morphological approach to curve evolution. The differential operators used in the standard PDE snake models can be approached using morphological operations on a binary level set. By combining the morphological operators associated to the PDE components we achieve a new snakes evolution algorithm. This new solution is based on numerical methods which are very simple, fast and stable. Moreover, since the level set is just a binary piecewise constant function, this approach does not require to estimate a contour distance function. To illustrate the results obtained we present some numerical experiments on real images.