We propose a novel external force for active contours, which we call neighborhood-extending and noise-smoothing gradient vector flow (NNGVF). The proposed NNGVF snake expresses the gradient vector flow (GVF) as a convolution with a neighborhood-extending Laplacian operator augmented by a noise-smoothing mask. We find that the NNGVF snake provides better segmentation than the GVF snake in terms of noise resistance, weak edge preservation, and an enlarged capture range. The NNGVF snake accomplishes this with a reduced computational cost while maintaining other desirable properties of the GVF snake, such as initialization insensitivity and good convergences at concavities. We demonstrate the advantages of NNGVF on synthetic and real images.
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