Deformable templates

Abstract

Deformable templates represent shapes as deformations of a given prototype, or template. Describing a shape therefore requires providing the following information: (1) A description of the template. (2) A description of the relation between the shape and the template. This has multiple interesting aspects. The first one is that the template needs to be specified only once, for a whole family of curves. Describing the variation usually results in a simpler representation, typically involving a small number of parameters. The conciseness of the description is important for detection or tracking algorithms in which the shape is a variable, since it reduces the number of degrees of freedom. Another aspect is that small-dimensional representations are more easily amenable to probabilistic modeling, leading, as we will see, to interesting statistical shape models.