Active appearance models using statistical characteristics of Gabor based texture representation

•The statistic characteristics of both GM and GP of an image are adopted for AAM.•GM and GP are modeled by LND and GGD respectively.•Three simplified Gabor based texture representations are constructed for AAM.

Active appearance model (AAM) has been successfully applied to register many types of deformable objects in images. However, the high dimension of intensity used in AAM usually leads to an expensive storage and computational cost. Moreover, intensity values cannot provide enough information for image alignment. In this paper, we propose a new AAM method based on Gabor texture feature representation. Our contributions are two-fold. On one hand, based on the assumption that Gabor magnitude and Gabor phase follow a lognormal distribution and a general Gaussian distribution respectively, three simplified texture representations are proposed. One the other hand, we apply the proposed texture representations in AAM, which is the first time to extract statistical features from both Gabor magnitude and Gabor phase as the texture representation in AAM. Tests on public and our databases show that the proposed Gabor representations lead to more accurate and robust matching between model and images.