Image segmentation is an important research area in image processing and a large number of different approaches have been developed over the last few decades. The active contour approach is one of the most popular among them. Within this framework, this thesis aims at developing robust algorithms, which can segment images with intensity inhomogeneities. We focus on the study of region-based external energies within the level set framework. We study the use of local image statistics for the design of external energies. Precisely, we address the difficulty of choosing the scale of the spatial window that defines locality. Our main contribution is to propose an adaptive scale for local region-based segmen¬tation methods. We use the Intersection of Confidence Intervals approach to define this pixel-dependent scale for the estimation of local image statistics. The scale is optimal in the sense that it gives the best trade-off between the bias and the variance of a Local Polynomial Approximation of the observed image conditional on the current segmenta¬tion. Additionally, for the segmentation model based on a Bayesian interpretation with two local kernels, we suggest to consider their values separately. Our proposition gives a smoother segmentation with less mis-localisations Chan the original method.Comparative experiments of our method to other local region-based segmentation me¬thods are carried out. The quantitative results, on simulated ultrasound B-mode images, show that the proposed scale selection strategy gives a robust solution to the intensity inhomogeneity artifact of this imaging modality. More general experiments on real images also demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.
