ArTemis: A Level Set Geodesic Active Tracker

Artemis1 is a program for detecting and tracking multiple moving objects over grey-level sequences which have been acquired from a static camera. Detection and tracking of moving objects in a sequence of images are problems arising in numerous applications of computer vision and image coding. During the last decade, many different approaches have been proposed in order to deal with these problems. Early tracking approaches worked with single points and edge-line segments but these models were very sensitive to occlusions. As a consequence, more complex tracking models were proposed to take into account global primitives such as contours and regions. In order to achieve this, deformable models (“snakes”) have been widely used, usually edge-based. On the other hand, there is a class of approaches optimizing the region contour by maximizing the intensities homogeneity inside the region. Finally, there are models that combine deformable regions and deformable contours and others that combine snake-based tracking approaches with motion-based region segmentation. The idea of applying the curve evolution theory to the tracking problem has been recently presented, and is the general framework on which is based ArTemis [1, 2] which proposes a user-interface framework for detecting and tracking moving objects in a sequence of