Dynamic geodesic snakes for visual tracking

Visual tracking using active contours is usually accomplished in a static framework. The active contour tracks the object of interest in a given frame of an image sequence, and then a subsequent prediction step ensures good initial placement for the next frame. This approach is unnatural, the curve evolution gets decoupled from the actual dynamics of the objects to be tracked. True dynamic approaches exist, all being marker particle based, and thus prone to the shortcomings of such particle-based implementations. In particular, topological changes are not handled naturally in this framework. The now "classical" level set approach is tailored for codimension one evolutions. However, dynamic curve evolution is at least of codimension two. We propose a natural, efficient, level set based approach for dynamic curve evolution which removes the artificial separation of segmentation and prediction, while retaining all the desirable properties of level set formulations. This is based on a new energy minimization functional which for the first time puts dynamics into the geodesic active contour framework.