  Image segmentation is a complex mathematical problem, especially for images
that contain intensity inhomogeneity and tightly packed objects with missing
boundaries in between. For instance, Magnetic Resonance (MR) muscle images
often contain both of these issues, making muscle segmentation especially
difficult. In this paper we propose a novel intensity correction and a
semi-automatic active contour based segmentation approach. The approach uses a
geometric flow that incorporates a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) edge
detector and a geodesic distance penalty term from a set of markers and
anti-markers. We test the proposed scheme on MR muscle segmentation and compare
with some state of the art methods. To help deal with the intensity
inhomogeneity in this particular kind of image, a new approach to estimate the
bias field using a fat fraction image, called Prior Bias-Corrected Fuzzy
C-means (PBCFCM), is introduced. Numerical experiments show that the proposed
scheme leads to significantly better results than compared ones. The average
dice values of the proposed method are 92.5%, 85.3%, 85.3% for quadriceps,
hamstrings and other muscle groups while other approaches are at least 10%
worse.
