Topology cuts: A novel min-cut/max-flow algorithm for topology preserving segmentation in N-D images

Topology is an important prior in many image segmentation tasks. In this paper, we design and implement a novel graph-based min-cut/max-flow algorithm that incorporates topology priors as global constraints. We show that optimization of the energy function we consider here is NPhard. However, our algorithm is guaranteed to find an approximate solution that conforms to the initialization, which is a desirable property in many applications since the global optimum solution does not consider any initialization information. The key innovation of our algorithm is the organization of the search for maximum flow in a way that allows consideration of topology constraints. In order to achieve this, we introduce a label attribute for each node to explicitly handle the topology constraints, and we use a distance map to keep track of those nodes that are closest to the boundary. We employ the bucket priority queue data structure that records nodes of equal distance and we efficiently extract the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CVIU
• Authors: Yun Zeng, Dimitris Samaras, Wei Chen, Qunsheng Peng
• Keywords: Algorithm, CVIU 2008, Topology, Topology Priors