The Application of an Active Contour Method for Extracting Human Face Contour

The active contour is an effective method to perform image segmentation. But its key technology problem is, both the establishment of a mathematic model and the development of the calculating algorithm are excessively dependent on the initial contour position. In dynamic image analysis, the difference method and the fast template matching algorithm provide available solutions for dealing with the problem of sensitivity to initial position in active contour method. In this paper, the initial position of human body was first tested by using difference operation of dynamic image sequence and binary. Then the face position was initially located by fast template matching algorithm. And finally, the face position was located by active contour algorithm of “balloon” model to extract the face contour.