Identifying and tracking ellipses: a technique based on elliptical deformable templates

This paper is about the problem of detecting and tracking ellipses in cluttered image sequences in the presence of wide displacements. We propose an original technique based on a deformable elliptical template. The mock-up of a well head was kindly provided by Tecnomare to test the application of the algorithm for the purpose of oil rig maintenance. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with that of two classical active contour models.