Variational Segmentation and Contour Matching of Non-Rigid Moving Object

In this paper we propose a method for variational segmentation and contour matching of non-rigid objects in image sequences which can deal with the occlusions. The method is based on a region-based active contour model of the Chan-Vese, augmented with a frame-to-frame interaction term which uses the segmentation result from the previous frame as a shape prior. This method has given good results despite the presence of minor occlusions, but can not handle significant occlusions. We have extended this approach by adding a registration step between two consecutive contours. This registration step is based on a novel variational formulation and gives also a mapping of the intensities from the interior of the previous contour to the next. With this information occlusions can be detected from deviations from predicted intensities and the missing intensities in the occluded areas can then be reconstructed. The performance of the method is shown with experiments on synthetic and real image sequences.