Automatic tracking and 3D localization of moving objects by active contour models

The matching problem is an important task in computer vision. It consists either to find the image of the same object in all the images of a sequence (temporal matching), or in two stereoscopic images (stereoscopic matching). In order to simplify the matching, only particular features of the images, called primitives, are used. Thus the matching is performed with primitives containing a low level of descriptive information which do not take into account the global structure of the objects. We propose to model moving objects by active contours, or snakes, to simplify both the temporal and the stereoscopic matching. When the stereoscopic matching is achieved, the distance between the object and the cameras is computed by triangulation. The mono vision algorithms used for the tracking and the stereo vision matching are described.