Fourier-based geometric shape prior for snakes

A novel method of snakes with shape prior is presented in this paper. We propose to add a new force which makes the curve evolve to particular shape corresponding to a template to overcome some well-known problems of snakes. The template is an instance or a sketch of the researched contour without knowing its exact geometric pose in the image. The prior information is introduced through a set of complete and locally stable invariants to Euclidean transformations (translation, rotation and scale factor) computed using Fourier transform on contours. The method is evaluated with the segmentation of myocardial scintigraphy slices and the tracking of an object in a video sequence.