Abstract

In this paper, the gradient vector flow fields are introduced in the  image anisotropic diffusion, and the shock filter, mean curvature flow and  Perona-Malik equation are reformulated respectively in the context of this flow  fields. Many advantages over the original models can be obtained, such as  numerical stability, a large capture range, and computational simplification etc.  In addition, the fairing process is introduced in the anisotropic diffusion, which  contains the fourth order derivative and is reformulated as the intrinsic  Laplacian of curvature under the level set framework. By this fairing process,  the boundaries of shape will become more outstanding. In order to overcome  numerical errors, the intrinsic Laplacian of curvature is computed from the  gradient vector flow fields, but not directly from the observed images.