Résumé en anglais

We propose a new model for active contours based on a geometric partial differential equation. Our model is intrinsec, stable (satisfies the maximum principle) and permits a rigorous mathematical analysis. It enables us to extract smooth shapes (we cannot retrieve angles) and it can be adapted to find several contours simultaneously. Moreover, as a consequence of the stability, we can design robust algorithms which can be engineed with no parameters in applications. Numerical experiments are presented.