Abstract
An original method for an automatic detection of contours in difficult images is proposed. This method is based on a tight cooperation between a multi-resolution neural network and a hidden Markov model-enhanced dynamic programming procedure. This new method is able to overcome the three major drawbacks of the "standard" active contours: initialization dependancy, exclusive use of local information and occlusion sensitivity. The driving idea is to introduce high-order a priori information in each step of the system. An application to the automatic detection of the left ventricle in digital X-ray images is proposed.