Tracking objects using density matching and shape priors

We present a novel method for tracking objects by combining density matching with shape priors. Density matching is a tracking method which operates by maximizing the Bhattacharyya similarity measure between the photometric distribution from an estimated image region and a model photometric distribution. Such trackers can be expressed as PDE-based curve evolutions, which can be implemented using level sets. Shape priors can be combined with this level-set implementation of density matching by representing the shape priors as a series of level sets; a variational approach allows for a natural, parametrization-independent shape term to be derived. Experimental results on real image sequences are shown.