WaterBalloons: a hybrid watershed balloon snake segmentation

Abstract

In this paper, a new image segmentation technique called WaterBalloons is introduced. It combines both Watershed segmentation and the Active Contour Model known as Balloon Snake. The Watershed transform has a major problem of over-segmentation. Solutions like Region merging, use of markers, use of multi-scales have been proposed. These approaches led to other problems such as under-segmentation. The Balloon Snake in an innovative approach that detects salient objects in an image. But in general Snakes are very sensitive to initialization and need user interactions and a-priori knowledge of objects to segment. WaterBalloons provide the advantage of reducing watershed over-segmentation problems while preventing under-segmentation and ensure automatic initialization of traditional snakes. In addition, a method for parameter optimization of the proposed hybrid snake is introduced based on energy transitions tracking.