A variational method for curve extraction (Q6908294)

In this interesting paper, the authors study an interesting variational method for curve extraction. They consider the problem of detecting open curves in images and then to simultaneously extract multiple curves and find their endpoints. For example, they study a variant of the following optimization problem using Smirnov's decomposition theorem: Given a potential \(g\), consider:\N\[\N\min_{z}\left\{\int g(x)d|z|(x):-\operatorname{div}(z)= \delta_{B}-\delta_{A}\right\}\N\]\Nwhere \(z\) is a measure vector field with total variation measure \(|z|\) and \(A\) and \(B\) are two given endpoints.\N\NThis is then used to create a bi-level minimization method to automatically extract curves and 1D structures from an image, which is mostly unsupervised. \N\NThe paper is written well with a good set of references.\N\NFor the entire collection see [Zbl 1573.68017].