A graph cut based active contour without edges with relaxed homogeneity constraint

The paper presents a graph cut based active contour without edges segmentation model to track pedestrian in thermal images. The deformable model is based on the Mumford- Shah piecewise constant energy formulation. However, the model presented here relaxes the global homogeneity assumption of the Mumford- Shah functional. A discrete energy formulation is presented and the optimization is performed using graph cuts. The major advantages of our approach are; 1) The optimization using graph cuts makes the segmentation process much faster than solving it using level sets. 2) Relaxing the global homogeneity assumption makes the model more practical.