A new steerable pressure force for parametric deformable models

Active contour models have been widely used in various image analysis applications. Despite their usefulness, there are problems limiting their utility, such as capture range, concavity conformation, and convergence rate. This paper presents a new pressure-like force that not only improves contour convergence rate, but also encourages contours to conform to concave regions. Unlike the traditional pressure force, this new force does not require users' input for the force direction and is steerable according to the image content. Better convergence rate as well as force normalization consistency of this new force are presented when compared with those of the gradient vector flow force field on synthetic images. Accuracies of these two methods are compared against the manual markups on a set of cardiac MRI images. Moreover, results on a MRI image smoothed at different levels demonstrate the robustness of this new force to noise.