An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set Driven Stochastic Active Contour Model with Uncertainty Analysis

Image segmentation is a process that densely classifies image pixels into different regions corresponding to real world objects. However, this correspondence is not always exact in images since there are many uncertainty factors, e.g., recognition hesitation, imaging equipment, condition, and atmosphere environment. To achieve the segmentation result with low uncertainty and reduce the influence on the subsequent procedures, e.g., image parsing and image understanding, we propose a novel stochastic active contour model based on intuitionistic fuzzy set, in which the hesitation degree is leveraged to model the recognition uncertainty in image segmentation. The advantages of our model are as follows. (1) Supported by fuzzy partition, our model is robust against image noise and inhomogeneity. (2) Benefiting from the stochastic process, our model easily crosses saddle points of energy functional. (3) Our model realizes image segmentation with low uncertainty and co-produces the quantitative uncertainty degree to the segmentation results, which is helpful to improve reliability of intelligent image systems. The associated experiments suggested that our model could obtain competitive segmentation results compared to the relevant state-of-the-art active contour models and could provide segmentation with a pixel-wise uncertainty degree.