Markov random field modeled level sets method for object tracking with moving cameras

Abstract

Object tracking using active contours has attracted increasing interest in recent years due to acquisition of effective shape descriptions. In this paper, an object tracking method based on level sets using moving cameras is proposed. We develop an automatic contour initialization method based on optical flow detection. A Markov Random Field (MRF)-like model measuring the correlations between neighboring pixels is added to improve the general region-based level sets speed model. The experimental results on several real video sequences show that our method successfully tracks objects despite object scale changes, motion blur, background disturbance, and gets smoother and more accurate results than the current region-based method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.