Tracking elongated structures using statistical snakes

In this paper we introduce a statistic snake that learns and tracks image features by means of statistic learning techniques. Using probabilistic principal component analysis a feature description is obtained from a training set of object profiles. In our approach a sound statistical model is introduced to define a likelihood estimate of the grey-level local image profiles together with their local orientation. This likelihood estimate allows to define a probabilistic potential field of the snake where the elastic curve deforms to maximise the overall probability of detecting learned image features. To improve the convergence of snake deformation, we enhance the likelihood map by a physics-based model simulating a dipole-dipole interaction. A new extended local coherent interaction is introduced defined in terms of extended structure tensor of the image to give priority to parallel coherence vectors