A novel method of parametric active contours with geometric shape prior is presented in this paper. The main idea of the method consists in minimizing an energy function that includes additional information on a shape reference called a prototype. Shape prior introduced through a similarity measurement between evolving contour and Procrustes mean shape of desired object. This similarity measurement is full Procrustes distance between these two contours that is invariant with respect to similarity transformations (translation, scaling, and rotation). This extra shape knowledge enhances the model robustness to noise, occlusion and complex background. We also use gradient direction information in addition to gradient magnitude for more robustness to complex background. In this paper we introduce one important application of this new snake \\\"3D object tracking\\\". We obtain promising results for 3D object tracking which show the robustness of our method against noise, complex background, similarity transformations, occlusion, and changing viewpoint of 3D object.

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