Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 506908, 10 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/506908
Research Article

Target Contour Recovering for Tracking People in Complex Environments

Jianhua Zhang,1 Sheng Liu,2 Y. F. Li,3 and Jianwei Zhang1

1Group TAMS, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, 22527 Hamburg, Germany
2College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, 18 Chaowang Road, Hangzhou 310014, China
3Department of System Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Received 13 June 2011; Accepted 18 August 2011

Academic Editor: Shengyong Chen

Copyright © 2012 Jianhua Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Recovering people contours from partial occlusion is a challenging problem in a visual tracking system. Partial occlusions would bring about unreasonable contour changes of the target object. In this paper, a novel method is presented to detect partial occlusion on people contours and recover occluded portions. Unlike other occlusion detection methods, the proposed method is only based on contours, which makes itself more flexible to be extended for further applications. Experiments with synthetic images demonstrate the accuracy of the method for detecting partial occlusions, and experiments on real-world video sequence are also carried out to prove that the method is also good enough to be used to recover target contours.