Adaptive color snake tracker using condensation algorithm

Motion tracking and object segmentation are the most fundamental and critical problems in vision tasks such as motion analysis. An active contour model, snake, was developed as a useful segmenting and tracking tool for rigid or non-rigid objects. Snake is designed on the basis of snake energies. Segmenting and tracking can be executed successfully by energy minimization. In this research, two new paradigms for segmentation and tracking are suggested. First, because the conventional method uses only intensity information, it is difficult to separate an object from its complex background. Therefore, a new energy and design schemes should be proposed for the better segmentation of objects. Second, conventional snake can be applied in situations where the change between images is small. If a fast moving object exists in successive images, conventional snake will not operate well because the moving object may have large differences in its position or shape, between successive images. Snake's nodes may also fall into the local minima in their motion to the new positions of the target object in the succeeding image. For robust tracking, the condensation algorithm was adopted to control the parameters of the proposed snake model called "adaptive color snake model (ACSM)". The effectiveness of the ACSM is verified by appropriate simulations and experiments.