Parametric contour estimation by simulated annealing

Virtually all implementations of simulated annealing are simplified by assuming discrete unknowns, however continuous-parameter annealing has many potential applications to image processing. Widely-scattered problems such as formant tracking, boundary estimation and phaseunwrapping can all be approached as the annealed minimizations of continuous B-spline parameters. The benefits of simulated annealing are well-known, including an insensitivity to initial conditions and the ability to solve problems with many local minima. Discretevariable annealing has seen broad application, however continuous-variable annealing is limited by the computational challenge of Gibbs sampling. In this paper we develop efficient approaches to sampling, illustrated in the context of contour tracking in noisy images.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICIP
• Authors: Michael Jamieson, Paul W. Fieguth, Leo J. Lee
• Keywords: Continuous B-spline Parameters, Continuous-parameter Annealing, Continuous-variable Annealing, Discretevariable Annealing, ICIP 2003, Image Processing, Simulated Annealing