United Snakes [image analysis software]

Since their debut in 1987, snakes (active contour models) have become a standard image analysis technique with several variants now in common use. We present a portable, reusable software package called "United Snakes". The package unites the most popular snake variants, including finite difference, B-spline, and Hermite polynomial snakes within the mathematical framework of a general finite element formulation with a choice of shape functions. The package furthermore incorporates a recently proposed snake-like technique known as "livewire". We integrate snakes and livewire by introducing an effective method for imposing hard constraints on snakes. Our experiments demonstrate that snakes and livewire have complementary strengths and that their union offers a more powerful tool for interactive image analysis, especially for medical imaging applications. United Snakes is implemented in Java as a JavaBean so that it can easily be integrated in end user application systems.