Speeded Up Gradient Vector Flow B-Spline Active Contours for Robust and Real-Time Tracking

Segmentation and tracking methods have been widely explore. However, they are often computationally heavy or require constraining assumptions. We present in this paper a new system for real-time simultaneous segmentation and tracking, without any hypothesis on target appearance, image background or camera properties. The proposed approach (SUGVPB) is an active contour modeled with B-splines and which evolution process is using a speeded up gradient vector flow, characterized by a faster computation of the edge diffusion process. The synergy of these two powerful components enables precise, robust and real-time tracking of complete non-rigid mobile objects. Our method has been validated on synthetic as well as natural video sequences.