Detection and tracking of moving objects using a new level set based method

In this paper, we propose a new method for detecting and tracking moving objects using active contours. The first contribution of our work is to propose a region-based approach using active contours to segment moving objects. A criterion including constraints on the defined domains is introduced and embedded in a dynamical scheme. Discontinuities between regions are explicitly taken into account by performing the derivative of the criterion according to the distribution theory. A PDE-driven active contour is obtained and implemented with the level set method. The final segmentation provides the partition into regions that minimize the criterion and thus moving objects are detected. The second contribution of our work is to propose a local motion estimation based on the level sets resulting from the segmentation process. This local motion estimation is well adapted to track deformable objects. Finally, the method is evaluated on real sequences