A MODIFIED MULTIPHASE LEVEL SET EVOLUTION SCHEME FOR AERIAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION

Abstract

This paper describes an innovative aerial images segmentation algorithm. The algorithm is based upon the knowledge of image multiscale geometric analysis using contourlet transform, which can extract the image's intrinsic geometrical structure efficiently. The contourlet transform is introduced to represent the most distinguished and the rotation invariant features of the image. A modified Mumford–Shah model is applied to segment the aerial image by a multifeature level set evolution. To avoid possible local minima in the level set evolution, we adjust the weighting coefficients of the multiscale features in different evolution periods, i.e. the global features have bigger weighting coefficients at the beginning stages which roughly define the shape of the contour, then bigger weighting coefficients are assigned to the detailed features for segmenting the precise shape. When the algorithm is applied to segment the aerial images with several classes, satisfied experimental results are achieved by the proposed method.