The Velocity Snake: Deformable Contour for Tracking in Spatio-Velocity Space

ISSN： 1077-3142

Source： Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Vol.73, Iss.3, 1999-03, pp. : 346-356

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Abstract

We present a new active contour model for boundary tracking and position prediction of nonrigid objects, which results from applying a velocity control to the class of elastodynamical contour models, known as snakes. The proposed control term minimizes an energy dissipation function which measures the difference between the contour velocity and the apparent velocity of the image. Treating the image video-sequence as continuous measurements along time, it is shown that the proposed control results in robust tracking. This is in contrast to the original snake model which is proven to have tracking errors relative to image (object) velocity, thus resulting in high sensitivity to image clutter. The motion estimation further allows for position prediction of nonrigid boundaries. Based on the proposed control approach, we propose a new class of real time tracking contours, varying from models with batch-mode control estimation to models with real time adaptive controllers.