Abstract: This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of several representative active contour models(i.e.,Snakes).When traditional Snakes are used in moving object tracking applications,they often encounter some defects,and an automatic initialization algorithm is designed to overcome these problems.The eight-neighbor searching algorithm is replaced by the four-neighbor-alternating searching method to reduce the computing cost,and a practical moving object tracking method based on Snake is proposed.Experiments are made to demonstrate the feasibility of the presented method.