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One dominating challenge in image segmentation is uneven illumination and inhomogeneous intensity, which are caused by the position of a light source or convex surface. This paper proposes a variational model based on the Retinex theory. To be specific, firstly, this paper figures out the pre-fitting reflectance by using an algorithm in the whole image domain before iterations; secondly, it reconstructs the image domain using an additive model; thirdly, it uses the deviation between the global domain and low-frequency component to approximate the reflectance, which is the significant part of an energy function. In addition, a new regularization term has been put forward to extract the vanishing gradients. Furthermore, the new regularization term is capable of accelerating the segmentation process. Symmetry plays an essential role in constructing the energy function and figuring out the gradient flow of the level set.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/sym14112343","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,11,8]],"date-time":"2022-11-08T10:54:40Z","timestamp":1667904880000},"page":"2343","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":16,"title":["An Active Contour Model Based on Retinex and Pre-Fitting Reflectance for Fast Image Segmentation"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"14","author":[{"given":"Chengxin","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Mechanical and Electric Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215137, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Lele","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Mechanical and Electric Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215137, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9960-9040","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yiyang","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Mechanical and Electric Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215137, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Guina","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Mechanical and Electric Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215137, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Guirong","family":"Weng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Mechanical and Electric Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215137, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,11,7]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"80","DOI":"10.1007\/s11263-009-0233-1","article-title":"Continuous Global Optimization in Multiview 3D Reconstruction","volume":"84","author":"Kolev","year":"2009","journal-title":"Int. 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