Nonlinear shape manifolds as shape priors in level set segmentation and tracking

We propose a novel nonlinear, probabilistic and variational method for adding shape information to level set-based segmentation and tracking. Unlike previous work, we represent shapes with elliptic Fourier descriptors and learn their lower dimensional latent space using Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models. Segmentation is done by a nonlinear minimisation of an image-driven energy function in the learned latent space. We combine it with a 2D pose recovery stage, yielding a single, one shot, optimisation of both shape and pose. We demonstrate the performance of our method, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with multiple images, video sequences and latent spaces, capturing both shape kinematics and object class variance.