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We propose a Hermite representation for deformable contour finding. This representa-tion compares favorably in terms of versatility and controllability with other local contour representations that have been used previously for this purpose. The Hermite representation allows a compact representation of curved shapes, without the smoothing out of corners. It is also well suited for both interactive and tracking applications. The Hermite representation is used to formulate the contour finding problem as an opti-mization problem using a maximum a posteriori energy criterion. Optimization is performed by dynamic programming. Our approach to contour tracking decouples the effects of trans-formation and deformation, using a template matching strategy to robustly account for the transformation effect. We demonstrate these ideas on a variety of images from different domains. ÄPEffOved ioi pußlic releases