Abstract: An active contour model combining both local and global image information is proposed in this paper to alleviate the high sensitivity on the contour initialization of the local image fitting(LIF) model.First,the force of level set evolution is defined as a linear combination of the global intensity fitting force based on the improved C-V model and the local intensity fitting force based on the LIF model.Then,by appropriately choosing the weights of the forces,our proposed model allows flexible initialization of the contours.Finally,Gaussian filtering regularized level set method is employed to regularize the level set function.Experimental results on both real and synthetic images show that the proposed model is robust to the contour initialization,while having the ability of handling intensity inhomogeneity.