Definition of a mutual reference shape based on information theory and active contours

In this paper, we propose to consider the estimation of a reference shape from a set of different segmentation results using both active contours and information theory. The reference shape is then defined as the minimum of a criterion that benefits from both the mutual information and the joint entropy of the input segmentations. This energy criterion is here justified using similarities between information theory quantities and area measures, and presented in a continuous variational framework. This framework brings out some interesting evaluation measures such as the specificity and sensitivity. In order to solve this shape optimization problem, shape derivatives are computed for each te…