@string{icpr="Proceedings of International Conference on Pattern Recognition"}
@INPROCEEDINGS{Molnar-etal2012,
  author = {Molnar, Csaba and Kato, Zoltan and Ian Jermyn},
  title = {A Multi-Layer Phase Field Model for Extracting Multiple Near-Circular
	Objects},
  booktitle = icpr,
  year = {2012},
  pages = {1427--1430},
  address = {Tsukuba Science City, Japan},
  month = nov,
  organization = {IAPR},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  abstract = {This paper proposes a functional that assigns low `energy' to sets
	of subsets of the image domain consisting of a number of possibly
	overlapping near-circular regions of approximately a given radius:
	a `gas of circles'. The model can be used as a prior for object extraction
	whenever the objects conform to the `gas of circles' geometry, e.g.
	cells in biological images. Configurations are represented by a multi-layer
	phase field. Each layer has an associated function, regions being
	defined by thresholding. Intra-layer interactions assign low energy
	to configurations consisting of non-overlapping near-circular regions,
	while overlapping regions are represented in separate layers. Inter-layer
	interactions penalize overlaps. Here we present a theoretical and
	experimental analysis of the model.}
}