A snake algorithm for automatically tracking multiple objects

Snake is an active contour for representing object contours. Traditional snake algorithms are often used to represent the contour of a single object. However, if there is more than one object in the image, the snake model must be adaptive to determine the corresponding contour of each object. Also, the previous initialized snake contours risk in getting wrong results when tracking multiple objects in successive frames due to the weak topology changes. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we present a new snake method for efficiently tracking contours of multiple objects. Our proposed algorithm can provide a straightforward approach for snake contour rapid splitting and connection, which usually cannot be gracefully handled by traditional snakes. Experimental results of various test sequence images with multiple objects show good performance which proves that the proposed method is both effective and accurate.