A PDE-based level-set approach for detection and tracking of moving objects

This paper presents a framework for detecting and tracking moving objects in a sequence of images. Using a statistical approach, where the inter-frame difference is modeled by a mixture of two Laplacian or Gaussian distributions, and an energy minimization based approach, we reformulate the motion detection and tracking problem as a front propagation problem. The Euler-Lagrange equation of the designed energy functional is first derived and the flow minimizing the energy is then obtained. Following the work by Caselles et al. (1995) and Malladi et al. (1995), the contours to be detected and tracked are modeled as geodesic active contours evolving toward the minimum of the designed energy, under the influence of internal and external image dependent forces. Using the level set formulation scheme of Osher and Sethian (1988), complex curves can be detected and tracked and topological changes for the evolving curves are naturally managed. To reduce the computational cost required by a direct implementation, of the formulation scheme of Osher and Sethian (1988), a new approach exploiting aspects from the classical narrow band and fast marching methods is proposed and favorably compared to them. In order to further reduce the CPU time, a multi-scale approach has also been considered. Very promising experimental results are provided using real video sequences.