Flexible and topologically localized segmentation

One of the most common visualization tasks is the extraction of significant boundaries, often performed with isosurfaces or level set segmentation. Isosurface extraction is simple and can be guided by geometric and topological analysis, yet frequently does not extract the desired boundary. Level set segmentation is better at boundary extraction, but either leads to global segmentation without edges, [CV01], that scales unfavorably in 3D or requires an initial estimate of the boundary from which to locally solve segmentation with edges. We propose a hybrid system in which topological analysis is used for semi-automatic initialization of a level set segmentation, and geometric information bounded topologically is used to guide and accelerate an iterative segmentation algorithm that combines several state-of-the-art level set terms. We thus combine and improve both the flexible isosurface interface and level set segmentation without edges