Active contours and optical flow for automatic tracking of flying vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, we describe fast implementations of optical flow and geometric active contours to reliably track flying vehicles. Given the position of the vehicle at time t-1, optical flow information is used to initially place an active contour in the basin of attraction of a region of interest in a given dynamical image at time t. For real-time tracking, fast convergence of the active contour as well as rapid computation of the optical flow are crucial. In this note, we describe algorithms that make fast tracking possible in this framework using only standard computing platforms.