Abstract: Aiming at the sensibility of geodesic active contour model to contour initialization， a model was proposed based on edge diffusion information fitting.A diffusion functional was defined， which is related to the second derivative in the normal direction of image edge，and the edge diffusion information was obtained by solving this diffusion functional.Then， the edge diffusion information was utilized to construct a novel force field， which drives the active contour to evolve and converge to desirable edges. An efficient numerical method was used for the implementation of the proposed model in order to converge rapidly and avoid reinitialization. Experimental results on a series of real and synthetic images demonstrate that the proposed model is robust to the initial contour， and it can segment the objects with the weak edges successfully， as well as the objects with complex geometry shapes and the objects with interior and exterior boundaries. It has better segmentation performance compared with some traditional models.

Key words: edge diffusion information, geodesic active contour, force field, level set