Velocity-Guided Tracking of Deformable Contours in Three Dimensional Space

摘要

This paper presents a 3D active contour model for boundary detection and tracking of non-rigid objects, which applies stereo vision and motion analysis to the class of energy-minimizing deformable contour models, known as snakes. The proposed contour evolves in three-dimensional space in reaction to a 3D potential function, which is derived by projecting the contour onto the 2D stereo images. The potential function is augmented by a kinetic term, which is related to the velocity field along the contour. This term is used to guide the inter-image contour displacement. The incorporation of inter-frame velocity estimates in the tracking algorithm is especially important for contours which evolve in 3D space, where the added freedom of motion can easily result in loss of tracking. The proposed scheme incorporates local velocity information seamlessly in the snake model, with little computational overhead, and does not require exogenous computation of the optical flow or related quantities in each image. The resulting algorithm is shown to provide good tracking performance with only one iteration per frame, which provides a considerable advantage for real time operation.