8.997> 1INTRODUCTION T HE problem of detecting and tracking moving objects has a wide variety of applications in computer vision such as coding, video surveillance, monitoring, augmented reality, and robotics. Additionally, it provides input to higher level vision tasks, such as 3D reconstruction and 3D representation. This paper addresses the problem using boundary-based information to detect and track several nonrigid moving objects over a sequence of frames acquired by a static observer. During the last decade, a large variety of motion detection algorithms have been proposed. Early approaches for motion detection rely on the detection of temporal changes. Such methods [1] employ a thresholding technique over the interframe difference, where pixelwise differences or block differences (to increase robustness) have been considered. The difference map is usually binarized using a predefined threshold value to obtain the motion/nomotion classi

Abstract. In this paper, we report an active contour algorithm that is capable of using prior shapes. The energy functional of the contour is modified so that the energy depends on the image gradient as well as the prior shape. The model provides the segmentation and the transformation that maps the segmented contour to the prior shape. The active contour is able to find boundaries that are similar in shape to the prior, even when the entire boundary is not visible in the image (i.e., when the boundary has gaps). A level set formulation of the active contour is presented. The existence of the solution to the energy minimization is also established. We also report experimental results of the use of this contour on 2d synthetic images, ultrasound images and fMRI images. Classical active contours cannot be used in many of these images.

Active contour and surface models, also known as deformable models, are powerful image segmentation techniques. Geometric deformable models implemented using level set methods have advantages over parametric models due to their intrinsic behavior, parameterization independence, and ease of implementation. However, a long claimed advantage of geometric deformable models—the ability to automatically handle topology changes—turns out to be a liability in applications where the object to be segmented has a known topology that must be preserved. In this paper, we present a new class of geometric deformable models designed using a novel topology-preserving level set method, which achieves topology preservation by applying the simple point concept from digital topology. These new models maintain the other advantages of standard geometric deformable models including subpixel accuracy and production of nonintersecting curves or surfaces. Moreover, since the topology-preserving constraint is enforced efficiently through local computations, the resulting algorithm incurs only nominal computational overhead over standard geometric deformable models. Several experiments on simulated and real data are provided to demonstrate the performance of this new deformable model algorithm.

A geometric approach for 3D object segmentation and representation is presented. The segmentation is obtained by deformable surfaces moving towards the objects to be detected in the 3D image. The model is based on curvature motion and the computation of surfaces with minimal areas, better known as minimal surfaces. The space where the surfaces are computed is induced from the 3D image (volumetric data) in which the objects are to be detected. The model links between classical deformable surfaces obtained via energy minimization, and intrinsic ones derived from curvature based flows. The new approach is stable, robust, and automatically handles changes in the surface topology during the deformation. Index Terms---3D segmentation, minimal surfaces, deformable models, mean curvature motion, medical images. ------------------------ F ------------------------ 1I NTRODUCTION ONE of the basic problems in image analysis is object detection. It can be associated with the problem of boundary detection, when boundaries are defined as curves or surfaces separating homogeneous regions. "Snakes," or active contours, were proposed by Kass et al. in [16] to solve this problem, and were later extended to 3D surfaces. The classical snakes and 3D deformable surfaces approach are based on deforming an initial contour or surface towards the boundary of the object to be detected. The deformation is obtained by minimizing a functional designed so that its (local) minima is at the boundary of the object [3], [33]. The energy usually involves two terms, one that controls the smoothness of the surface and the other that attracts it to the object's boundary. The topology of the final surface is, in general, as that of the initial one, unless special procedures are used to detect possible spli...

This paper presents a novel variational method for supervised texture segmentation. The textured feature space is generated by filtering the given textured images using isotropic and anisotropic filters, and analyzing their responses as multi-component conditional probability density functions. The texture segmentation is obtained by unifying region and boundary-based information as an improved Geodesic Active Contour Model. The defined objective function is minimized using a gradient-descent method where a level set approach is used to implement the obtained PDE. According to this PDE, the curve propagation towards the final solution is guided by boundary and region-based segmentation forces, and is constrained by a regularity force. The level set implementation is performed using a fast front propagation algorithm where topological changes are naturally handled. The performance of our method is demonstrated on a variety of synthetic and real textured frames. 1 Introduction Texture ...

This paper proposes a new front propagation method to deal accurately with the challenging problem of tracking non-rigid moving objects. This is obtained by employing a Geodesic Active Region model where the designed objective function is composed of boundary and region-based terms and optimizes the curve position with respect to motion and intensity properties. The main novelty of our approach is that we deal with the motion estimation (linear models are assumed) and the tracking problem simultaneously. In other words, the optimization problem contains a coupled set of unknown variables; the curve position and the corresponding motion model. The designed objective function is minimized using a gradient descent method; the curve is propagated towards the object boundaries under the influence of boundary, intensity and motion-based forces, while given the curve position an analytical solution is obtained for the motion model. Besides, the PDE is implemented using a level set approach ...

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In this paper, we develop a novel region-based approach to snakes designed to optimally separate the values of certain image statistics over a known number of region types. Multiple sets of contours deform according to a coupled set of curve evolution equations derived from a single global cost functional. The resulting active contour model, in contrast to many other edge and region based models, is fully global in that the evolution of each curve depends at all times upon every pixel in the image and is directly coupled to the evolution of every other curve regardless of their mutual proximity. As such evolving contours enjoy a very wide “field of view, ” endowing the algorithm with a robustness to initial contour placement above and beyond the significant improvement exhibited by other region based snakes over earlier edge based snakes. C ○ 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: active contours; curve evolution; snakes; segmentation; gradient flows.

The active contour/snake model is one of the most successful variational models in image segmentation. It consists of evolving a contour in images toward the boundaries of objects. Its success is based on strong mathematical properties and efficient numerical schemes based on the level set method. The only drawback of this model is the existence of local minima in the active contour energy, which makes the initial guess critical to get satisfactory results. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by determining a global minimum of the active contour model. Our approach is based on the unification of image segmentation and image denoising tasks into a global minimization framework. More precisely, we propose to unify three well-known image variational models, namely the snake model, the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi denoising model and the Mumford-Shah segmentation model. We will establish theorems with proofs to determine the existence of a global minimum of the active contour model. From a numerical point of view, we propose a new practical way to solve the active contour propagation problem toward object boundaries through a dual formulation of the minimization problem. The dual formulation, easy to implement, allows us a fast global minimization of the snake energy. It avoids the usual drawback in the level set approach that consists of initializing the active contour in a distance function and re-initializing it periodically during the evolution, which is time-consuming. We apply our segmentation algorithms on synthetic and real-world images, such as texture images and medical images, to emphasize the performances of our model compared with other segmentation models.

There are currently two main types of active contours: 1) parametric active contours, which represent contours explicitly as parameterized curves; and 2) geometric active contours, which represent contours implicitly as level sets of two-dimensional scalar functions. In this paper, we derive an explicit mathematical relationship between the general formulations of parametric and geometric active contours. Based on this relationship and the results of two recent parametric active contours, we propose two new geometric active contours. Using both simulated and real images, we show that the proposed algorithms have an improved performance over both existing parametric and geometric active contours. 1 Introduction Active contours [9], a physically-motivated model that can deform itself to recover object shape from digital images, have been extensively researched in the past decade (see [14] for a recent survey on this topic). Current active contours can be classified as either parametric...