A Lip Contour Extraction Method Using Localized Active Contour Model with Automatic Parameter Selection

Lip contour extraction is crucial to the success of a lipreading system. This paper presents a lip contour extraction algorithm using localized active contour model with the automatic selection of proper parameters. The proposed approach utilizes a minimum-bounding ellipse as the initial evolving curve to split the local neighborhoods into the local interior region and the local exterior region, respectively, and then compute the localized energy for evolving and extracting. This method is robust against the uneven illumination, rotation, deformation, and the effects of teeth and tongue. Experiments show its promising result in comparison with the existing methods.