Multi-dimensional earth mover's distance active contours

Abstract

This article is the first to ever introduce multi-dimensional and arbitrary ground distances Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) active contours. We present a segmentation algorithm based on moving interfaces which maximize the EMD between the enclosed region and the background. To illustrate the validity of our multi-dimensional extension we present results for color images represented using 3D color signatures. The ground distances between signature centroids are made equal to the Euclidean distance between them in the perceptually uniform L*a*b* color space.