Tracking 3D free form object in video sequence

In this paper we describe an original method for the 3D free form object tracking in monocular vision. The main contribution of this article is the use of the skeleton of an object in order to recognize, locate and track this object in real time. Indeed, the use of this kind of representation made it possible to avoid difficulties related to the absence of prominent elements in free form objects (which makes the matching process easier). The skeleton is a lower dimension representation of the object, it is homotopic and it has a graph structure. This allowed us to use powerful tools of the graph theory in order to perform matching between scene objects and models (recognition step). Thereafter, we used skeleton extremities as interest points for the tracking. Keywords: Tracking, 3D free form object, Skeletonization, Graph matching.