Active Contours The Application of Techniques from Graphics, Vision, Control Theory and Statistics to Visual Tracking of Shapes in Motion

Active Contours deals with the analysis of moving images - a topic of growing importance within the computer graphics industry. In particular it is concerned with understanding, specifying and learning prior models of varying strength and applying them to dynamic contours. Its aim is to develop and analyse these modelling tools in depth and within a consistent framework.

1 Introduction.- 1.1 Organisation of the book.- 1.2 Applications.- 2 Active shape models.- 2.1 Snakes.- 2.2 Deformable templates.- 2.3 Dynamic contours.- I Geometrical Fundamentals.- 3 Spline curves.- 4 Shape-space models.- 5 Image processing techniques for feature location.- 6 Fitting spline templates.- 7 Pose recovery.- II Probabilistic Modelling.- 8 Probabilistic models of shape.- 9 Dynamical models.- 10 Dynamic contour tracking.- 11 Learning motion.- 12 Non-Gaussian models and random sampling algorithms.- A Mathematical background.- A.1 Vectors and matrices.- A.2 B-spline basis functions.- A.3 Probability.- B Stochastic dynamical systems.- B.1 Continuous-time first-order dynamics.- B.2 Second-order dynamics in continuous time.- B.3 Accuracy of learning.- C Farther shape-space models.- C.1 Recursive synthesis of shape-spaces.- Glossary of notation.- Author Index.