Patent ID: 7764838

Claim:
A method for extracting an object of interest from an image, comprising: generating an active shape model of a physical object, wherein the active shape model includes model points; acquiring an image of the object, wherein the image includes feature points of the object and image outliers, the image outliers being feature points that are not part of the object; extracting the feature points from the image; determining an affine transformation and shape parameters of the active shape model to minimize an energy function of a distance between a transformed and deformed model of the object and the feature points, wherein the energy function matches the model points and the feature points to each other, rejects model points for which there are no matching feature points present in the image as model outliers and rejects the image outliers; and producing a representation of the object as a result of determining an affine transformation and shape parameters of the active shape model, wherein the representation does not include the rejected model and image outliers.