Magnetic Resonance Imaging Segmentation via Weighted Level Set Model Based on Local Kernel Metric and Spatial Constraint

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) segmentation is a fundamental and significant task since it can guide subsequent clinic diagnosis and treatment. However, images are often corrupted by defects such as low-contrast, noise, intensity inhomogeneity, and so on. Therefore, a weighted level set model (WLSM) is proposed in this study to segment inhomogeneous intensity MRI destroyed by noise and weak boundaries. First, in order to segment the intertwined regions of brain tissue accurately, a weighted neighborhood information measure scheme based on local multi information and kernel function is designed. Then, the membership function of fuzzy c-means clustering is used as the spatial constraint of level set model to overcome the sensitivity of level set to initialization, and the evolution of level set function can be adaptively changed according to different tissue information. Finally, the distance regularization term in level set function is replaced by a double potential function to ensure the stability of the energy function in the evolution process. Both real and synthetic MRI images can show the effectiveness and performance of WLSM. In addition, compared with several state-of-the-art models, segmentation accuracy and Jaccard similarity coefficient obtained by WLSM are increased by 0.0586, 0.0362 and 0.1087, 0.0703, respectively.

Disparity Computation Through PDE and Data-Driven CeNN Technique

This paper proposes a variational approach by minimizing the energy functional to compute the disparity from a given pair of consecutive images. The partial differential equation (PDE) is modeled from the energy function to address the minimization problem. We incorporate a distance regularization term in the PDE model to preserve the boundaries' discontinuities. The proposed PDE is numerically solved by a cellular neural network (CeNN) algorithm. This CeNN based scheme is stable and consistent. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown by a detailed experimental study along with its superiority over some of the existing algorithms.

An Improved Latent Low Rank Representation for Automatic Subspace Clustering

There is growing interest in low rank representation (LRR) for subspace clustering. Existing latent LRR methods can exploit the global structure of data when the observations are insufficient and/or grossly corrupted, but it cannot capture the intrinsic structure due to the neglect of the local information of data. In this paper, we proposed an improved latent LRR model with a distance regularization and a non-negative regularization jointly, which can effectively discover the global and local structure of data for graph learning and improve the expression of the model. Then, an efficiently iterative algorithm is developed to optimize the improved latent LRR model. In addition, traditional subspace clustering characterizes a fixed numbers of cluster, which cannot efficiently make model selection. An efficiently automatic subspace clustering is developed via the bias and variance trade-off, where the numbers of cluster can be automatically added and discarded on the fly.

An Image Segmentation Method Based on Improved Regularized Level Set Model

When the level set algorithm is used to segment an image, the level set function must be initialized periodically to ensure that it remains a signed distance function (SDF). To avoid this defect, an improved regularized level set method-based image segmentation approach is presented. First, a new potential function is defined and introduced to reconstruct a new distance regularization term to solve this issue of periodically initializing the level set function. Second, by combining the distance regularization term with the internal and external energy terms, a new energy functional is developed. Then, the process of the new energy functional evolution is derived by using the calculus of variations and the steepest descent approach, and a partial differential equation is designed. Finally, an improved regularized level set-based image segmentation (IRLS-IS) method is proposed. Numerical experimental results demonstrate that the IRLS-IS method is not only effective and robust to segment noise and intensity-inhomogeneous images but can also analyze complex medical images well.