Affine and projective active contour models

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of active contours in terms of progressive modification of an initial contour following the chosen Lie group of object-to-image transformations. Because of non-fronto-parallel viewing of an object or due to relative motion between the camera and the object, the resultant image may undergo affine or projective object-to-image transformations. In a recent paper we have shown that in the case of object tracking, frame-to-frame deformations of an initial curve obtained through Euler–Lagrange descent equations of a curve functional can be used to enact a desired Lie group of plane transformations [A.-R. Mansouri, D.P. Mukherjee, S.T. Acton, Constraining active contour evolution via Lie groups of transformation, IEEE Trans. Image Process. 13 (2004) 853–863]. In this work, we propose an energy functional that encodes the Lie group transformation parameters, which in turn guide shape distortion due to oblique viewing. Additional constraints, such as transformation smoothness, are imposed on the active contour by modifying the energy functional. The functional is minimized using numerical schemes similar to the conjugate gradient technique, and the convergence properties are discussed. The success of the technique for affine and projective scenes is demonstrated with both synthetic and real image examples and compared with the related approaches.