Mechanical simulation for image segmentation
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Last month I posted a tutorial on snakes. I explained that with snakes, the segmentation solution is obtained by minimizing an energy functional. The gradient descent minimization then yields an update function for the snake that can be seen as a set of internal and external forces acting on the snake. I was curious to see where we would get if we were to define the snake simply as a set of balls, connected with each other through springs, moving over the image with momentum, friction, and all the rest. For this, we will completely abandon the notions of gradient descent, function minimization, and so forth, and write a simple Newtonian physics simulation.