Snakes, or active contours, are used extensively in computer vision and image processing applications, particularly to locate object boundaries. Problems associated with initialization and poor convergence to concave boundaries, however, have limited their utility. This paper develops a new external force for active contours, largely solving both problems. This external force, which we call gradient vector flow (GVF), is computed as a diffusion of the gradient vectors of a gray-level or binary edge map derived from the image. The resultant field has a large capture range and forces active contours into concave regions. Examples on simulated images and one real image are presented.