Hermite deformable contours

We propose the Hermite representation for deformable contour finding. This representation compares favorably in terms of versatility and controllability with other local contour representations that have been used previously for this purpose. The Hermite representation allows a compact representation of curved shapes, without the smoothing out of corners. It is also well suited for both interactive and tracking applications. The Hermite representation is used to formulate the contour finding problem as an optimization problem using a maximum a posteriori energy criterion. Optimization is performed by dynamic programming. Our approach to contour tracking decouples the effects of transformation and deformation, using a template matching strategy to robustly account for the transformation effect. We demonstrate these ideas on a variety of images from different domains