Detecting multiple moving targets using deformable contours

This paper 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, we transform the moving objects detection 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 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.