%0 Conference Proceedings %F Collewet09c %A Collewet, C. %T Polar snakes: A fast and robust parametric active contour model %B IEEE Int. Conf. on Image Processing, ICIP'09 %P 3013-3016 %C Cairo, Egypt %X We present in this paper a way to perform a fast and ro- bust image segmentation and to track a contour along a se- quence of images. Our approach is based on a dynamic de- formable model. More precisely, we revisit the physics based- model proposed in [1] to show the benefit of using a polar description to model the contour, in particular to cope with the well-known initialization problem. Indeed, we show that this way to proceed leads to diagonal and constant matrices in the equations of the snake evolution yielding therefore to a faster algorithm. Experimental results on image segmenta- tion and contour tracking validate the efficiency of this new formulation. %U http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/62/97/94/PDF/icip.pdf %8 November %D 2009