Region tracking through image sequences

The paper describes an approach to the tracking of complex shapes through image sequences, that combines deformable region models and deformable contours. A deformable region model is presented: its optimisation is based on texture correlation and is constrained by the use of a motion model, such as rigid, affine or homographic. The use of texture information (versus edge information) noticeably improves the tracking performances of deformable models in the presence of texture. Then the region contour is refined using an edge based deformable model in order to better deal with specularities, non planar objects and occlusions. The method is illustrated and validated by experimental results on real images