This paper proposes an algorithm to solve most of existing active contour problems based on the approach of mean curvature motion proposed by Chambolle in [1] and the image denoising model of Rudin, Osher and Fatemi (ROF) introduced in [2]. More precisely, the motion of active contours is discritized by the ROF model applied to the signed distance of the evolving contour. The advantage of this new discretization scheme is to use a time step much larger than in standard explicit schemes, which means that less iterations are needed to converge to the steady state solution. We present results on 2-D natural images.
Xavier Bresson, Tony F. Chan