Snakuscules.

A snakuscule (a minuscule snake) is the simplest active contour that we were able to design while keeping the quintessence of traditional snakes: an energy term governed by the data, and a regularization term. Our construction is an area-based snake, as opposed to curve-based snakes. It is parameterized by just two points, thus further easing requirements on the optimizer. Despite their ultimate simplicity, snakuscules retain enough versatility to be employed for solving various problems such as cell counting and segmentation of approximately circular features. In this paper, we detail the design process of a snakuscule and illustrate its usefulness through practical examples. We claim that our didactic intentions are well served by the simplicity of snakuscules.