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Image Segmentation Based on the Poincar Map Method

Delu Zeng, Zhiheng Zhou, and Shengli Xie, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractActive contour models (ACMs) integrated with various kinds of external force elds to pull the contours to the exact boundaries have shown their powerful abilities in object segmentation. However, local minimum problems still exist within these models, particularly the vector elds equilibrium issues. Different from traditional ACMs, within this paper, the task of object segmentation is achieved in a novel manner by the Poincar map method in a dened vector eld in view of dynamical systems. An interpolated swirling and attracting ow (ISAF) vector eld is rst generated for the observed image. Then, the states on the limit cycles of the ISAF are located by the convergence of NewtonRaphson sequences on the given Poincar sections. Meanwhile, the periods of limit cycles are determined. Consequently, the objects boundaries are represented by integral equations with the corresponding converged states and periods. Experiments and comparisons with some traditional external force eld methods are done to exhibit the superiority of the proposed method in cases of complex concave boundary segmentation, multiple-object segmentation, and initialization exibility. In addition, it is more computationally efcient than traditional ACMs by solving the problem in some lower dimensional subspace without using level-set methods. Index TermsActive contour, dynamical system, external force eld, limit cycle, NewtonRaphson algorithm, Poincar map method, segmentation.

I. INTRODUCTION egmentation for objects of interest from the image data is an important task in computer vision. Within this area, active contour models (ACMs) or snakes [1], [2] have become popular by exhibiting their powerful abilities in object detection and shape representation within the past two decades. Active contours are usually dened by the curve ows mainly derived from minimizing some variational problems or energy functionals [1], [3], [5][10], [21], [27]. Generally, there are two types of ACMs, i.e., parametric active contours [1], [2]

Manuscript received October 26, 2009; revised August 03, 2011; accepted September 05, 2011. Date of publication September 15, 2011; date of current version February 17, 2012. This work was supported in part by the Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under Grant 2010CB731800, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60804051, Grant 60974072, Grant 61003170, and Grant 61103121, in part by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant 20090172120011, in part by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant 20100740923, in part by the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation under Grant s2011010001936, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, South China University of Technology, under Grant 2009ZM0295. The Associate Editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas. D. Zeng and Z. Zhou are with South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China (e-mail: donald_scut@yahoo.com.cn; zhouzh@scut.edu.cn). S. Xie is with Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China (e-mail: eeoshlxie@scut.edu.cn). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TIP.2011.2168408

and geometric active contours (GACs) [6], [8], [9]. The former type usually establishes an energy functional composed of internal and external energy terms. It is not intrinsic and has difculty in determining and handling the topological changes of evolving contours. The latter one constructs an intrinsic Riemannian metric-based functional. Then, the active contours are treated as the zero crossings of level-set functions [4], [5]. It can tackle topological changes elegantly at the cost of more computational costs. To our understanding and also in light of some papers in this area [10][24], there are mainly three difculties with the above active contours. First, the evolution direction of the active contour should be predened. Second, they are usually sensitive to initialization, that is, they will slowly evolve and even wrongly converge as the initial contour is far away from or cross the desired boundaries. Third, the active contour usually sticks into some local minima of the energy functional and, thus, cannot progress further into the deep concavities of the boundaries. Within the many efforts [11][14], [19][22], [27] working on the above difculties, two types of methods are discussed here. One type is region-based methods [25][27], where energy optimization is not driven by boundary information but by region information of the image. In particular, for the model presented in [27], it is inspired (or simplied) from the MumfordShah functional [25], and optimization is done using the statistical information both inside and outside the active contour. Another type of method aims to pull the active contour to the desired boundaries by some new external force elds. Moreover, the tool of the vector eld was adopted herein and proven to be effective, particularly by gradient vector ow (GVF) [11], [28], generalized GVF (GGVF) [12], and vector eld convolution (VFC) [13]. These vector elds are to take the role of the external force elds for the evolving active contour. For GVF/GGVF methods, a smoothed vector eld is generated by diffusing the gradient of the edge map for an observed image to the whole image domain to enlarge the capture range of the contour. This way, the active contour will move across the local minima, where it is usually stuck. The intrinsic model proposed in [14] as an integration of GGVF and GAC has more freedom in initialization and can deal with topological changes. Recently, a VFC method that has been proposed in [13] seems much more remarkable, where the authors proposed an external force eld by convolving the edge map with a user-dened vector eld kernel. Compared with the classic GVF methods, it is more robust to noise without boundary distortion by a Gaussian lter, and it has less computational costs. These vector eld methods, e.g., GVF/GGVF and VFC, generally perform elegantly in pulling or pushing the active contours to the desired boundaries. However, it has been found out

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recently [17], [19], [23] that there still exist some difculties for traditional vector eld methods to apply to boundary extraction with multiple objects and complex concavities: there usually exist some unpreventable conict components in these vector elds, which will stop the active contour from progressing further to locate the exact boundaries; and the initialization exibility is still restricted to a certain degree, as it is noted that the initialization stage was declared to be also signicant by some papers [17], [18], [33]. In this paper, an interpolated swirling and attracting ow (ISAF) eld is generated by extending a so-called edge tangent ow (ETF) only with a nonzero value at the boundaries to the whole image domain. It is a static vector eld. Different from traditional vector elds, the components in this vector eld near the boundary are not perpendicular but tangent to the boundary. Thus, in the proposed vector eld, it is possible for evolution to be carried out along the boundaries. Then, the proposed time-invariant vector eld is considered as the right-hand-side vector-valued function of an autonomous dynamical system. As a result, the segmentation problem is translated to the problem of the limit cycle location by applying the related theory in dynamical systems. Section II briey reviews several ACMs and their integrations with the classic external force elds and then discusses some issues of the vector eld ACMs. Section III describes in detail the proposed method, including the generation of the ISAF eld and how to handle object segmentation in the framework of dynamical systems. Then, experimental analysis is given in Section IV, followed by Section V to conclude this paper. II. ON CURVE EVOLUTION Here, we briey summarize several kinds of ACMs accompanied with their integrations with external force elds in curve evolution and then point out some of their shortcomings. In what , where follows, the observed image is denoted by is the pixel position, and the gradient magnitude of the image . (edge map) is denoted by A. GVF Snakes The classic parametric active contour or snake model developed by Kass et al. [1] was obtained by minimizing the following functional:

The integrations of classic snakes and GVF or generalized GVF (GGVF) were obtained by Xu and Prince [11], [12]. They in (2) with vector eld proposed replacing obtained by minimizing another functional, i.e.,

(3) or

(4) where, within each functional, the rst and second terms are for , and regularization and conformity, respectively; , are weights to govern the tradeoff between regularization and conformity. A minimum of this functional will bear the property when that the value of the vector eld approximates to is large and slowly varies when is small. of (3) or of (4), Consequently, with the minimum the following GVF or GGVF curve ow [11], [12] was proposed for boundary extraction: (5)

B. VFC Snakes The authors in [13] proposed another external force eld, i.e., VFC, by convolving the edge map with a vector eld kernel. VFC snakes have large capture ranges and are more robust to noise. The VFC eld was given by (6) where is the gradient magnitude of the image, and is the vector eld kernel alternatively dened by , where is a small positive number. VFC snakes is similar to GVF/GGVF snakes just by replacing in (5) with . C. GAC and GVF The geodesic active contour (GAC) introduced in [6][8] is obtained by minimizing an intrinsic functional dened by the weighted length of the curve. The corresponding objective functional is (7)

(1) where and are positive weighting parameters to control ten, respecsion and rigidity of planar curve is some external constraints imposed on the tively, and curve. By calculus of variations and gradient descent, this minimization was achieved by calculating the steady-state solution of the following curve evolution ow: (2)

where is a decreasing boundary stopping function that is positive such that and as . Due to the development of level-set methods [4], where the active contours are implicitly represented by the zero-crossings

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Fig. 1. Two traditional vector eld methods fail to segment the object with a cross-shaped concave boundary within two different initializations (the rst and second rows). From left to right of each initialization (row): Initial contour, result with the GVF snake, in the vector eld view of GVF, result with the VFC snake, and in the vector eld view of VFC.

of a higher dimensional function, topological changes or multiple boundary extraction is elegantly handled. The level-set formulation [7] of the GAC ow to minimize (7) is (8) In [14], the integration of GVF with GAC in level-set formulation was proposed by

[11] nor VFC snakes [13] succeed in completely locating the objects boundary with cross-shaped concavities in the two given initializations. III. PROPOSED METHOD Within this section, the proposed method is stated in detail. An ISAF is rst proposed. Then, with the techniques of dynamical systems, the limit cycles corresponding to the observed objects are located by the NewtonRaphson algorithm in the dened Poincar section. Since the limit cycle theory, particularly the Poincar map method, is used in this paper, the objects to be segmented in the observed images are required to have closed boundaries. A. ISAF Field

(9) where level-set tribution is is a GVF [11] or GGVF [12] eld; is the is a parameter to determine the confunction; of the curves smoothness; and weighting function dened by sign , with as a scale factor.

D. Equilibrium Issues Within the Vector Field Active Contour In this part, some shortcomings on the above active contour integrated with vector elds are revealed. In fact, after diffusing or extending the gradient of the edge map to the whole image domain, all sets of continuous sinks in the resulting vector eld correspond to the objects boundaries of the observed image. Only after the vector eld has been generated that we shall have the knowledge of the positions of the other equilibria, e.g., sources and saddles. Moreover, it is difcult for us to determine the positions of these equilibria in the resulting vector eld before we generate the vector elds. Consequently, as pointed out in [18], [19], and [23], conict components may usually exist in the resulting vector eld to prevent the active contour from further approaching the boundaries. The above problem is called the equilibrium issue of these vector eld methods. As illustrated in Fig. 1, although the VFC snake can progress a bit further into the boundary, neither GVF snakes

Inspired by the idea in [12], an ISAF eld for the observed image is generated in this part. It is composed of two components, namely, diffused ETF (DETF; swirling component) and diffused edge perpendicular ow (DEPF; attracting component). They are directly described here by the evolution equation form for simplicity. is given First, DETF by the steady-state solution of the following evolution equation: (10) where is dened as in (7), and called ETF, is dened by sign . , which is (11)

In (11), is perpendicular to , i.e., . The ETF dened by (11) is a thin ow moving around the objects boundaries with a xed direction (see the third subgure in Fig. 2). It has components with a nonzero vector value near the boundaries and with a zero vector value elsewhere. It seems and have similar properties like , since within these two elds, the layers composed of the two neighboring sides of the boundaries are nonzero. However, the two swirling directions for the two sides of the objects boundaries in

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Fig. 2. Four kinds of vector elds of the image with a cross-shaped concave boundary. From left to right:

rf , rI

,v

, and DETF elds.

are reverse to each other (see the rst subgure in Fig. 2); for , these two swirling directions for the two sides are the same, but these nonzero layers are too thick (see the second subgure in Fig. 2) to cause distortion in later segmentation. For these reasons, neither of them is appropriate to dene the here. When is diffused by (10), a conproposed tinuous DETF eld will be generated in the full image domain, with swirling components (eddies) around the objects boundaries and nonzero components in homogeneous (at) regions. The above analysis is further illustrated in Fig. 2. As shown in the last subgure in Fig. 2, the ETF eld is diffused to spread to the whole image domain, and there exists an eddy exactly at the location of the objects boundary. Consequently, any particle in the image domain would move to the boundary along the diffused streamlines. Then, the particle would nally rotate along the objects boundary round and round. This is a key feature different from the traditional vector eld, e.g., GVF and VFC. However, in DETF, the degree of swirl (rotation) for the streamlines away from the boundary is too high; thus, the journeys are so long for the streamlines start away from the boundary to move to the boundary. In fact, we just need a ow eld bearing the properties that its components away from the boundary would point directly to the boundary and its components near the boundary are tangent to the boundary with a xed direction (either clockwise or counterclockwise). Fortunately, it also reminds us of the properties of GGVF [12] and VFC [13]. They are called DEPF here. Alternatively, DEPF is generated by the steady-state solution of the following evolution equation GGVF [12]: (12) Finally, the proposed ISAF is generated by interpolating the above DETF and DEPF as follows: (13) The ISAF eld of the mentioned image with a cross-shaped concave boundary is shown in Fig. 3. Different from the traditional vector elds, i.e., GVF [11], GGVF [12], and VFC [13], in which the vector eld components near the boundaries point directly toward the boundaries, the proposed vector eld will produce stable periodical streamlines along the boundaries. As a result, particles far away from the objects boundaries would be guided directly to the boundaries and then move along the boundaries round and round. Fig. 4 shows the trajectory of a

Fig. 3. Example of the proposed ISAF eld of the cross-shaped concave boundary image.

Fig. 4. Trajectory of a particle moving in the ISAF eld.

Fig. 5. Examples for active contours failure to extract the boundary if the ISAF eld is treated as the external force eld. Left column: Two kinds of initialization. Right column: Corresponding results.

particle moving in the ISAF eld. The trajectory of the particle from the time it visits the boundary corresponds to the objects boundary. We should note that the proposed ISAF cannot be the external force eld for the classic ACMs as the swirling components may cause the active contour to evolve to disorders easily, e.g., in Fig. 5.

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B. Within the Framework of Dynamical Systems Within the above part, an ISAF eld for the observed image is rst constructed, where its eddies correspond to the objects boundaries. Naturally, the properties of the vector eld remind us of the limit cycle theory in dynamical systems. As far as we know, a dynamical system is usually dened by an array of , , ordinary differential equations, e.g., , , and is the where vector eld. In nonlinear dynamical systems, limit cycles are isolated closed periodical trajectories of the vector eld in the state space, where the neighboring trajectory is not closed and spiral toward or away from these cycles as time goes to innity. Thus, they share common features with the above eddies. In fact, the above eddies can be considered as limit cycles of a vector eld that belongs to some dynamical systems. Consequently, with the knowledge of dynamical systems [30], the limit cycles are located, including their periods and candidate points on the limit cycles. correIn particular, ISAF sponds to the following autonomous dynamical system: (14) For convenience, it is written into the following vectorial form: (15) where . When an initial state is given, then the previous system is an initial-value problem (IVP), i.e., (16) The integral expression of the above IVP is (17) is the trajectory in the state space with the initial Then, and time . state at Consequently, the problem of nding the point on the limit cycle is equal to locating the zeros of (18) is a candidate for the period of the limit cycle. Note where is meaningless and beyond our that trivial solution consideration here. Poincar Map: In this part, the elementary knowledge of the Poincar map is introduced. In the state space of the dynamical system (15), every limit cycle (if there exists) has its basin of attraction, where all the streamlines in the region ow to the limit cycle. In addition, within the state space, its Poincar section, which is denoted by here, can be dened as a lower dimensional hyperplane transversal to the ow of the system. In particular, it should intersect with its corresponding limit cycle. The corresponding limit cycle means the limit cycle, the basin of attraction for

Fig. 6. Poincar section and positive Poincar map.

which the Poincar section lies in. Specically, if illustrated can be dened by in Fig. 6, the section passing through , where is the normal of . The Poincar map, which is denoted by , is a diffeomorphism de, , where is the time for ned by emanating from to cross again to some trajectory direction determined by normal . According to the direction to which crosses again, the one-sided Poincar map can be dened. For example and also for the purpose of the proposed , algorithm, the positive-side Poincar map, which is named s.t. both and is dened by are positive. Note that we still use to denote to come back and cross the section to the rst time for and are the direction such that both positive. Then, a Poincar section for the vector eld ISAF is dened in the following context. Equivalently, its normal needs to be dened. For an initial is dened in such a way state , normal that (19) ; and are the corresponding complex where and when the rst and second componumbers for nents of the vector are treated as the real and imaginary parts, Arg , with Arg respectively; and as the operation for the principal value of the argument. In fact, is a deviation angle that is nonzero to make the future iteration in (29) more stable [justied in (33) and (32)]. By elementary computations, the normal is equivalently written into

(20) Thus, the Poincar section is described as (21) Obviously, the previously dened Poincar section will be transversal to the ow, particularly to the limit cycles more easily. To make the above argument clearer, an example is given in Fig. 7 to illustrate the proposed Poincar section on the above image with a cross concave boundary. However, in Fig. 7, only the ISAF component near the boundary is shown,

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Substituting (25) into (24), it then yields

(26) Lemma: For IVP (16), if is continuously differentiable within a connected open domain , then the solution of this IVP , is as well continuously differentiable [in (17)], i.e., w.r.t. , and (27) (The proof may appear in some literatures of dynamical systems, e.g., [30]. However, it is restated in Appendix B for the readers to read it conveniently.) Investigating the generation process of the ISAF by (10), (12), and are obviously twice and (13), we have the fact that differentiable. Thus, the conditions of the above lemma are considered to be guaranteed (approximately) for weighted resultant . Then, with (26) and (27), it further yields

Fig. 7. Example of the proposed Poincar section, where the component away from the boundary is screened.

whereas the component away from the boundary is screened to zero to draw the proposed section clearer. Consequently, we have the corresponding Poincar map dened as well when its section is dened and xed in the above way. Then, for an initial state , we further have the fact that without period is a function of , which is denoted by loss of generality. Eventually, period will be implicitly computed, and (18) is written as (22) , and . where Zero Computation by the NewtonRaphson Algorithm: The zeros of (22) are computed by the NewtonRaphson algorithm as in [29]. As it is pointed out in [29], if the variables are independently treated in the iteration of the of and NewtonRaphson sequence, then a poor value of may easily to move far away from even if is on the cause limit cycle. Thus, the iteration is usually unstable. In fact, once [see (22)]. Then, the Poincar section is xed, depends on only and be more stable. In the iteration will be done w.r.t. , particular, this iteration is to run in the Poincar section which is a lower dimensional subspace of the vector eld. Differentiating both sides of (22) w.r.t. , it yields

(28) where is dened by (20) and

Finally, an iterative sequence to converge to the zeros of in (22) by the NewtonRaphson algorithm [31] is constructed as follows:

(29) is implicitly computed (not by an iterative where computation) at each iteration by directly searching when a trahits section to have , and the jectory starting at integral in (28) is approximated by a summation. C. Multiple-Object Segmentation In this part, without using the level-set method [4], [9], the proposed method is applied to multiple-object segmentation. Concretely, the corresponding ISAF eld for an observed image is constructed rst. Then, distinct initial states, e.g., , are randomly placed in the image domain. They roughly correspond to the number of objects in the observed image. However, usually, is chosen more than the number of desired objects. Then, these states will move along the ow to generate trajectories within the ow eld, and nally, they will move to the orbits along the objects boundaries round and round to nish the object location.

(23) Via IVP (16), it further yields

(24) By Appendix A, we have (25)

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TABLE I EXPERIMENTAL DETAILS FOR THE FOUR SYNTHETIC IMAGES IN FIG. 8

For each of the initial states, the corresponding Poincar sections are dened. Then, with the NewtonRaphson sequence constructed in (29), we compute the xed points of the corresponding proposed Poincar maps and, at the same time, nd the corresponding periods implicitly. In particular, with the iteration of (29), converged states on s.t. as the boundaries are denoted by , where . Furthermore, the corresponding . periods are denoted by , Consequently, the representation for the objects boundaries with converged states is (30) where (31) It is possible that some converged states may be on the same orbit to cause these orbits in the above representation to coincide. However, the corresponding periods are close to each other in this case. Utilizing this fact, one may have a rough judgement of which orbits coincide. To be more precise, one may compute the distance between the orbits with close periods, e.g., and , where and . IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Here, the proposed method is applied to various observed images to verify its performance. Because the digital images are dened only on a discrete grid of integers, within these applications, the iterations of states are done in continuous real space by linearly interpolating the obtained vector eld (ISAF) to ensure convergence, not by rounding off to integers at each iteration. In addition, the implementations of the proposed method are given together with some comparisons with the traditional methods that were mentioned in the beginning of this paper. A. Experiments on Synthetic Images The proposed method is applied to four synthetic images (see Fig. 8), including the objects with a deep concave boundary, with a cross-shaped concave boundary, with four discs, and with nested boundaries. Within each experiment, the initial states (star-shaped points) are randomly placed in the image domain.
Fig. 8. Experiments with the proposed method on four synthetic images. Left column: Initial states (white star-shaped points) and converged states (white square points) of NewtonRaphson sequences. Right column: Boundary representation.

Then, the iteration sequence generated by (29) are converged to the converged states (white square points) on the limit cycles (boundaries). Meanwhile, the periods for every converged states are found, which correspond to the boundary length of the objects. In the end, with these converged states and the periods at hand, the objects boundaries are represented one by one with (30). Furthermore, the corresponding experimental details are presented in Table I. Naturally, it is found that the periods of the orbits that coincide are close. In Fig. 9, another experiment is done on a synthetic sh with complex deep concave boundaries by drawing its ISAF eld in detail. As shown in the subgure of the ISAF, the swirling

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Fig. 11. The proposed method is applied to a lake image for two initializations. Left column: Initial states (white star-shaped points) and converged states (white square points) of NewtonRaphson sequences. Right column: Boundary representation.

Fig. 9. Experiments with the proposed method on a synthetic sh with complex concave boundaries. From top to bottom, left to right: Observed image, ISAF eld, 12 initial states (white star-shaped points) and converged states (white square points) of NewtonRaphson sequences, and boundary representation.

Fig. 12. The proposed method is applied to three medical images. Left column: Initial states (white star-shaped points) and converged states (white square points) of NewtonRaphson sequences. Right column: Boundary representation.

Fig. 10. The proposed method is applied to a four-island image for two initializations. Left column: Initial states (white star-shaped points) and converged states (white square points) of NewtonRaphson sequences. Right column: Boundary representation.

third experiment in Fig. 12), where some parts of the boundaries are weak. Moreover, the proposed method is applied to some more real-life images in Fig. 13 to further validate its effectiveness. C. Initialization Sensitivity In this part, some analysis on the sensitivity of the proposed method to initialization is given by the experiments in Fig. 14. There are ve pieces of boundaries of the two spanners in the observed image. The experiment is repeated by different numbers of initial states randomly placed in the image domain. Each initial state belongs to only one basin of attraction, leading to one piece of boundary. In the rst three applications, eight randomly placed initial states are given, and they all converged to the corresponding pieces of boundaries and construct them. To construct the holes inside the spanners, in the fourth application, 50 initial states are randomly given. They converge and construct all of the ve pieces of boundaries. Consequently, each state is able to construct the complete piece of boundary to give a meaningful result. In this sense, the proposed algorithm has

components are still immune from the deep concave boundaries, although the boundaries are more complex. B. Experiments on Real Images The proposed method is applied to more real images in this part. First, it is applied to two aerial photos with two different initializations, e.g., four islands in Fig. 10 and a lake in Fig. 11, and later to three real medical images in Fig. 12. For the applications in Fig. 10, the initial states are randomly placed in the image domain. For the other experiments, the initial states are manually placed in the basins of attraction of the corresponding boundaries, and then, the converged states are also located by the iteration of (29). Consequently, the segmented boundaries are presented in Figs. 10 12 (right columns). From these experiments, it is noted that the proposed method performs well to locate multiple, concave, and inhomogeneous boundaries (see the

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with GGVF to generate a balloon force, can guide the contour to the boundaries from both sides. However, GGVFGAC still fails to segment the boundaries in the given images since the application of the vector eld will usually give birth to overwhelmed power to stop the contour from splitting. V. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSIONS In this paper, object segmentation is achieved in a novel manner by the Poincar map method in the eld of dynamical systems. First, for an observed image, an ISAF vector eld is proposed, where there exist swirling components (with xed directions) near the objects boundaries. This is a key feature of the ISAF compared with the traditional vector eld utilized in the ACM method. These swirling components treated as limit cycles in view of dynamical systems correspond to the desired objects. Then, the Poincar section and the corresponding Poincar map for the ISAF are dened. Consequently, given some initial states in the vector eld, they naturally belong to the basins of attraction of the corresponding limit cycles. After that, the NewtonRaphson algorithm is utilized to locate the limit cycles via locating one point on each limit cycle. In the end, the objects boundaries are represented by integral equations. Without using the time-consuming level-set methods like most of the ACMs, the proposed algorithm can achieve multiple-boundary extraction by placing some initial states in the vector eld. In addition, it runs more efciently since the NewtonRaphson algorithm is carried out in the Poincar sectiona lower dimensional subspace of the image domainwhile the traditional ACMs evolve the contour in the whole image domain. The proposed method elegantly performs in some local minima problems, e.g., multiple and complex concave boundaries extraction, and it has much more exibility in initializations. Although most traditional literatures tackle the local minima problem either by establishing new functionals or by evolving curves in new external force elds, this paper succeeds in representing the closed boundaries of the objects with the beautiful tool of the Poincar map method. However, we should admit that the proposed method can only handle closed boundaries. For open-boundary extraction, the limit cycle theory may not be applied. Moreover, there are still several further issues we might care about: 1) Different from most traditional ACMs where usually the smoothness of the nal curves to represent the boundor even higher, the proposed method aries is required to be does not explicitly incorporate regularization constraints into the representation curves, which are determined by the Poincar . That may mostly accord with map method and are only the fact that the boundary is usually only continuous. 2) It may be future work when the proposed method is done in a multiscale framework to enhance robustness. 3) The extension of the proposed method to 3-D object segmentation may be possible but more challenging when one needs to generate more delicate ISAF elds in 3-D space. 4) User interaction, like most image-editing methods, can as well be added to rene the direction of the Poincar section, in addition to placing the initial states in the corresponding basins of attraction.

Fig. 13. The proposed method is applied to three more real images. Left column: Initial states (white star-shaped points) and converged states (white square points) of NewtonRaphson sequences. Right column: Boundary representation.

good exibility to initialization, and further justication will be found in the following part of comparisons with some traditional methods. D. Comparisons to Some Traditional Vector Field Methods To exhibit the superiority of the proposed method, some famous traditional vector eld integrated methods (some is in the framework of level-set methods), including GGVF snakes [12], VFC snakes [13], GAC methods [8], and GGVFGAC methods [14], are applied to the two following images by two different initializations for comparisons in Fig. 15. In the rst initialization, where almost all the boundaries are surrounded by the initial curves, for the image of spanners, VFC snakes perform better than GGVF snakes; however, for the image of a synthetic sh with very complex concave boundaries, they all poorly behave. In addition, these curves do not adapt their topology to multiple-object segmentation. In the second initialization, where the initial contours cross the boundaries, both GGVF and VFC snakes poorly perform in these two images. For the spanner image, GAC, where the level-set method is utilized, shows a relatively good result in the rst initialization but cannot locate the nested boundaries inside the spanners; it works worse in the second initialization, where it fails to nd any piece of complete boundaries. However, for the synthetic sh image, GAC still poorly performs for the two initializations. It seems that different initializations of these three methods will give birth to different results, and very often, they poorly perform in these two images. To reduce the initialization sensitivity, GGVFGAC, which combines GAC

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Fig. 14. The proposed method is run on the image of spanners among different random initializations. From the left column: The number of initial states in the rst three applications is 8, whereas the number of initial states in the fourth application is 50.

Fig. 15. Comparisons with some traditional methods for two different initializations on two images of synthetic sh and real spanners. From the left column: Two initializations, GGVF snake result, VFC snake, GAC result, and GGVFGAC result.

APPENDIX A COMPUTATION OF Because from (22) we have lently means that , it yields , it equiva. Differentiating w.r.t.

By the denitions of (19) and (21), it holds that (33) Then, from (32), it yields (34) APPENDIX B PROOF OF THE LEMMA (32) First, we state a notation below. Given a vector-valued , function

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, and an increase . A notation is given by (35) where , and is the element of the matrix. For the IVP in (16), given an initial state and an increase , it yields (36)

, where is a constant. Consequently, the integrand in and . Passing limit, it yields f (39) is continuous w.r.t.

(40) Let , then from (40), it yields (41)

By the notation in (35), it then yields

(37)

It corresponds to the following IVP: (42) Then, we have

Since at

is continuously differentiable, by Taylor expansion , one obtains

(43)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. (38) is Lipschitz in , and with the It as well implies that theory of continuous dependence on initial conditions and pa, then rameters [32], if , and further, . Let , then the following integral equation is obtained: REFERENCES
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Delu Zeng received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in applied mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in electronic and information engineering from South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, in 2003, 2005, and 2009, respectively. His research interests include partial differential equations, machine learning, and their applications in image/video processing, i.e., image segmentation and object tracking.

Zhiheng Zhou received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in applied mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in electronic and information engineering from South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, in 2000, 2002, and 2005, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with South China University of Technology. His research interests include image processing and image and video transmission.

Shengli Xie (M01SM02) received the M.S. degree in mathematics from Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China, in 1992 and the Ph.D. degree in control theory and applications from South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, in 1997. He is currently a Full Professor with Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China. He is the author or coauthor of two books and more than 70 scientic papers in journals and conference proceedings. His research interests include automatic control and blind signal processing.