TY - JOUR T1 - Estimation of contour motion and deformation for nonrigid object tracking JF - Journal of the Optical Society of America AJ. Opt. Soc. Am. A Y1 - 2007 A1 - Jie Shao A1 - Porikli,Fatih A1 - Chellapa, Rama KW - Motion detection KW - VISION AB - We present an algorithm for nonrigid contour tracking in heavily cluttered background scenes. Based on the properties of nonrigid contour movements, a sequential framework for estimating contour motion and deformation is proposed. We solve the nonrigid contour tracking problem by decomposing it into three subproblems: motion estimation, deformation estimation, and shape regulation. First, we employ a particle filter to estimate the global motion parameters of the affine transform between successive frames. Then we generate a probabilistic deformation map to deform the contour. To improve robustness, multiple cues are used for deformation probability estimation. Finally, we use a shape prior model to constrain the deformed contour. This enables us to retrieve the occluded parts of the contours and accurately track them while allowing shape changes specific to the given object types. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the tracker performance. VL - 24 UR - http://josaa.osa.org/abstract.cfm?URI=josaa-24-8-2109 CP - 8 M3 - 10.1364/JOSAA.24.002109 ER -