Active contour models are widely used in image segmentation. In order to obtain ideal object boundary, researchers utilize various information to define new models for image segmentation. However, the models could not meet all scenes of image. In this paper, we propose a block evolution method to improve the robustness of contour evolution. A block matrix is consisted of contours of former iterations and contours of shape prior, and a nuclear norm of the matrix is a measure of the similarity of these shapes. The constraint of the nuclear norm minimization is imposed on the evolution of active contour models, which could avoid large deformation of the adjacent curves and keep the shape conformability of contour in the evolution. The shape prior can be integrated into the block evolution method, which is effective in dealing with missing features of images and noise. The proposed method can be applied to image sequence segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves the robust performance of active contour models and can increase the flexibility of applications in image sequence segmentation.
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