1. A method for detecting and tracking a deformable object having a sequentially changing behavior, comprising: using imaging apparatus to perform the steps of: developing a temporal statistical shape model of the sequentially changing behavior of an embedding function representing the object from prior motion, comprising: developing a hand segmented image sequence showing training of the object and level set functions for each one of the shapes; computing a sequence of shape vectors comprising principal component representations of the level set functions; estimating a dynamical model of for the sequence of shape vectors; and determining the one of the sequence of shape vectors having the maximum probability of matching the dynamical model; and wherein the estimating of the dynamical model comprises approximating the shape vectors α t ≡α φ t of the sequence of level set functions by a Markov chain of order k, in accordance with α t =μ+A 1 α t−1 +A 2 α t−2 +. .. +A k α t−k +η, where η is zero-mean Gaussian noise with covariance Σ.