Contour tracking using weighted structure tensor based variational level set

A novel contour tracking method using weighted structure tensor based variational level set is proposed in this paper. The image is first converted to weighted structure tensor field by extracting a positive definite symmetric covariance matrix for each pixel. Then, a level set method is employed to represent object contour implicitly which separates the image domain into two areas each modeled by tensor field based Gaussian mixture model separately. By solving a gradient flow equation of energy functional with respect to the level set, the object contour will converge to its real profile in the newly arrived frame. Experimental results on several video sequences demonstrate the better performance of our method than the other two contour tracking algorithms.