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Global and Local Active Contours for Head Boundary Extraction

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Abstract

Active contours are an attractive choice to extract the head boundary, for deployment within a face recognition or model-based coding scenario. However, conventional snake approaches can suffer difficulty in initialisation and parameterisation. A dual active contour configuration using dynamic programming has been developed to resolve these difficulties by using a global energy minimisation technique and a simplified parameterisation, to enable a global solution to be obtained. The merits of conventional gradient descent based snake (local) approaches, and search-based (global) approaches are discussed. In application to find head and face boundaries in front-view face images, the new technique employing dynamic programming is deployed to extract the inner face boundary, along with a conventional normal-driven contour to extract the outer (head) boundary. The extracted contours appear to offer sufficient discriminatory capability for inclusion within an automatic face recognition system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISIS Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of, Southampton, SO17 IBJ, UK. E-mail

    Steve R. Gunn & Mark S. Nixon

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  1. Steve R. Gunn
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  2. Mark S. Nixon
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Gunn, S.R., Nixon, M.S. Global and Local Active Contours for Head Boundary Extraction. International Journal of Computer Vision 30, 43–54 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008065429466

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008065429466

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