Balloon energy based on parametric active contour and directional Walsh–Hadamard transform and its application in tracking of texture object in texture background

One of the popular approaches in object boundary detecting and tracking is active contour models (ACM). This article presents a new balloon energy in parametric active contour for tracking a texture object in texture background. In this proposed method, by adding the balloon energy to the energy function of the parametric ACM, a precise detection and tracking of texture target in texture background has been elaborated. In this method, texture feature of contour and object points have been calculated using directional Walsh–Hadamard transform, which is a modified version of the Walsh–Hadamard. Then, by comparing the texture feature of contour points with texture feature of the target object, movement direction of the balloon has been determined, whereupon contour curves are expanded or shrunk in order to adapt to the target boundaries. The tracking process is iterated to the last frames. The comparison between our method and the active contour method based on the moment demonstrates that our method is more effective in tracking object boundary edges used for video streams with a changing background. Consequently, the tracking precision of our method is higher; in addition, it converges more rapidly due to it slower complexity.