Robust real time vehicle contour tracking on moving camera aerial infra red imagery

In this paper, we propose a real time, robust contour tracker for vehicles in IR images captured from an aerial moving camera. Lack of a background model, lack of a motion model and lack of any training data make the job challenging, but realistic. We compare a standard approach of contour evolution using energy minimization in the snakes algorithm with our Harris corner based Elliptical Fourier contour representation. We show that our approach produces better results and is robust to different initialization strategies.