Abstract: A new scheme is proposed to extract and track the object contour automatically in this paper, it combines the active contour based on the gradient vector flow(GVF-Snakes) and the genetic algorithm (GA) based on the fine-grained model.On the one hand, the GVF-Snakes is improved by using the edge criterion instead of the complex energy computation to reduce its complexity and speed up its search.On the other hand, the selection of the array of the reference points by the GA enhances the extracting performance of the extreme concave contours and noise-disturbing contours.Experiment on the synthetic and natural images demonstrate its robustness and accuracy.

Key words: GVF-Snakes, genetic algorithm, active contour, fine-grained model