Abstract
Pattern recognition methods have become a powerful tool for segmentation in the sense that they are capable of automatically building a segmentation model from training images. However, they present several difficulties, such as requirement of a large set of training data, robustness to imaging conditions not present in the training set, and complexity of the search process. In this paper we tackle the second problem by using a deep belief network learning architecture, and the third problem by resorting to efficient searching algorithms. As an example, we illustrate the performance of the algorithm in lip segmentation and tracking in video sequences. Quantitative comparison using different strategies for the search process are presented. We also compare our approach to a state-of-the-art segmentation and tracking algorithm. The comparison show that our algorithm produces competitive segmentation results and that efficient search strategies reduce ten times the run-complexity.