Detecting Multiple Moving Targets using Deformable Contours

This papers presents a framework for detecting multiple moving moving objects in a sequence of images. Using a statistical approach, where the inter-frame difference is modeled by a mixture of two Laplacian distributions and a deformable contour-based energy minimization approach, we reformulate the motion detection problem as a front propagation problem. Following the work of geodesic active contours [2], we transform the detection of moving objects problem into an equivalent problem of geodesic computation, which is solved using a level set formulation scheme. To reduce the computational cost required by a direct implementation of the formulation scheme [5] the Narrow Band technique is used. In order to further reduce the CPU time, a multi-scale approach has also been considered. Very promising experimental results are provided using real video sequences