Multi agent system for boundary detection and object tracking in image sequence based on active contours

Abstract

This paper proposes a new multi agent system for boundary detection and object tracking in image sequence. It exploits advantages of three elements: multi agent solution, active contour model and multi resolution treatment. The proposed system is organized as multi level structure where each level is composed of many cooperative agents. In edge detection step, snake agents in higher level of image pyramid cooperate to get object boundaries in low resolution image. Then, it transmits its result to subsystem agents of inferior level and these ones cooperate to refine object edge in next image, and so on. In the second step, high level agents migrate to the next pyramid for tracking edges in the next image of sequence, in parallel with detection step of inferior subsystem in previous image, using the same cooperation and scheduling strategy. The efficiency of the system is shown through some experimental results.