A SHAPE-CONSTRAINT-BASED SPLITTING ACTIVE CONTOUR MODEL AND ITS APPLICATIONS

概要

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This paper presents a new splitting active contour model which can extract the shapes of multiple objects included in one initial contour individually. Most of the approaches based on active contour models (Snakes) cannot extract the shapes of multiple objects, since they require that one initial contour includes one object. To overcome this problem, the proposed method utilizes a splitting mechanism which works according to two types of Snake energy functions. Based on the difference in the extraction results obtained by minimizing their energy functions, an initial contour is split into multiple contours. After iterative splitting, each contour can include one object. Therefore, our splitting Snake can extract the desired object even if other objects are included within the same initial contour together. For evaluating its extraction performance, we apply our splitting Snake to extracting facial features from an image sequence taken from TV news program. The extraction results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
2003-01-15