Visual Tracking Using Snake Algorithm Based on Optical Flow Information

An active contour model, Snake, was developed as a useful segmenting and tracking tool lot rigid or non-rigid (i.e. deformable) objects by Kass in 1987 In this research, Snake is newly designed to cover this large moving case. Image flow energy is proposed to give Snake the motion information of the target object. By this image flow energy Snake's nodes can move uniformly along the direction of the target motion in spite of the existences of local minima. Furthermore, when the motion is too large to apply image flow energy to tracking, a jump mode is proposed for solving the problem. The vector used to make Snake's nodes jump to the new location can be obtained by processing the image flow. The effectiveness of the proposed Snake is confirmed by some simulations.