Abstract:Statistical shape prior model is employed to construct the dynamics in probabilistic contour estimation. By applying principal component analysis, plausible shape samples are efficiently generated to predict contour samples. Based on the shape-dependent dynamics and probabilistic image model, a particle filter is used to estimate the contour with a specific shape. Compared with the deterministic approach with shape information, the proposed method is simple yet more effective in extracting contours from images with shape variations and occlusion.