Robust contour extraction for moving vehicle tracking

A robust framework is proposed for contour extraction and moving vehicle tracking. First, we establish a modified snake model and utilize directional information to guide the behavior of snaxels. Then, an adaptive shape restriction is embedded into the algorithm to govern the scope of the snake´s motion. The spatio-temporal relationship between successive frames is estimated using a Kalman filter. These can improve the snake´s robustness against noise or the presence of occlusion, which is inevitable in real tasks of traffic monitoring. Experimental results of the proposed framework on real traffic videos are satisfying and encouraging.