How to track efficiently piecewise curved contours with a view to reconstructing 3D objects

This paper addresses the problem of rigid and nonpolyhedral object tracking in complex environments without a priori knowledge neither on objects nor on the camera motion. The key of our approach is to propose a robust curve based tracking algorithm founded on an iterative registration method and exploiting our rigid snake model. In order to ensure the convergence of the tracking process, we then present supervision strategies we have developed to control both the prediction step and the snake convergence. Finally, since recovering accurate contour localization is important for reconstruction task, we propose a cooperative use of the snake model and of a corner detector to finely detect piecewise curved contours.