Propagation of fronts in a nonlinear fourth order equation

Abstract

We consider a geometric motion associated with the minimization of a curvature dependent functional, which is related to the Willmore functional. Such a functional arises in connection with the image segmentation problem in computer vision theory. We show by using formal asymptotics that the geometric motion can be approximated by the evolution of the zero level set of the solution of a nonlinear fourth-order equation related to the Cahn–Hilliard and Allen–Cahn equations.