Abstract: As the active contour model segments images using level set formulation, such formulation
results in very slow algorithms that get easily stuck in local solutions and only segment image with
intensity homogeneity. In this paper, a new model combining region-based with geodesic active
contours is proposed for image segmentation. The new energy functional can be iteratively minimized
by graph cut algorithms with high computational efficiency compared with the level set framework.
Experiment results show that the proposed model can effectively and efficiently segment images with
intensity inhomogeneity. The method is less sensitive to the location of initial contour and can also
avoid local minima solutions.

Key words: image segmentation, active contours, level set method, graph cut