Human contour extraction using level set

Human contour information is important for human activity understanding and human motion capture. Traditional human contour extraction methods are based on image morphological operation, but they will fail when the contour information is dim and discontinuous. In this paper, a novel method using level set technique for human contour extraction in video frames with still background is proposed Firstly the human profile is detected via image difference with background. After appropriate thresholding and morphological operation, the possible human profile region is then found out according to the image projection using the detected region boundary as the initial evolving curve, the accurate human contour is extracted using a modified level set method, experiments show that this method is caster and more efficient than traditional level set methods.