Contour Extraction Based on Improved Snake Model and its Application in Vehicle Identification

Abstract

Contour curve is an important shape feature for vehicle recognition and it is a hard work to extraction it from complex dynamic traffic video for in-vehicle detection system. Snake Model is used to automatically extract the object contour curve proposed by Kass et al, but it is inability for traffic objects. Presented here is a novel approach for extracting vehicle contour curve by combining stereo vision with Snake Model. In this paper, Stereo vision is first used to segment vehicle from traffic background, then Snake Model is adopted to obtain complete contour curve. In view of classical Snake model is easily affected by noise, here we propose a improved Snake model by combining corner detection technology with Distance Potential Snake Model. Moreover, a vehicle identification method based on contour curve is presented. The method presented here was tested on complex traffic scenes and the corresponding results prove the efficiency of our proposed method.