Anisotropic Chan-Vese segmentation

Abstract

In this paper we study a variant to Chan-Vese image segmentation model with rectilinear anisotropy. We show existence of minimizers in the $2$-phases case and how they are related to the (anisotropic) Rudin-Osher-Fatemi denoising model (ROF). Our analysis shows that in the natural case of a piecewise constant on rectangles image (PCR function in short), there exists a minimizer of the Chan-Vese functional which is also piecewise constant on rectangles over the same grid that the one defined by the original image. In the multiphase case, we show that minimizers of the Chan-Vese multiphase functional also share this property in the case that the initial image is a PCR function. We also investigate a multiphase and anisotropic version of the Truncated ROF algorithm, and we compare the solutions given by this algorithm with minimizers of the multiphase anisotropic Chan-Vese functional.