@conference {1251, title = {A Multi-Layer Phase Field Model for Extracting Multiple Near-Circular Objects}, booktitle = {International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)}, year = {2012}, month = {Nov 2012}, pages = {1427 - 1430}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, type = {Conference paper}, address = {Tsukuba, Japan}, abstract = {

This paper proposes a functional that assigns low {\textquoteleft}energy{\textquoteright} to sets of subsets of the image domain consisting of a number of possibly overlapping near-circular regions of approximately a given radius: a {\textquoteleft}gas of circles{\textquoteright}. The model can be used as a prior for object extraction whenever the objects conform to the {\textquoteleft}gas of circles{\textquoteright} geometry, e.g. cells in biological images. Configurations are represented by a multi-layer phase field. Each layer has an associated function, regions being defined by thresholding. Intra-layer interactions assign low energy to configurations consisting of non-overlapping near-circular regions, while overlapping regions are represented in separate layers. Inter-layer interactions penalize overlaps. Here we present a theoretical and experimental analysis of the model.

}, isbn = {978-1-4673-2216-4 }, author = {Csaba Molnar and Zoltan Kato and Ian Jermyn}, editor = {Jan-Olof Eklundh and Yuichi Ohta and Steven Tanimoto} }