Robust kernel-based tracking algorithm with background contrasting

The mean shift algorithm has achieved considerable success in object tracking due to its simplicity and robustness. It finds local minima of a similarity measure between the color histograms or kernel density estimates of the model and target image. The most typically used similarity measures are the Bhattacharyya coefficient or the Kullback-Leibler divergence. In practice, these approaches face three difficulties. First, the spatial information of the target is lost when the color histogram is employed, which precludes the application of more elaborate motion models. Second, the classical similarity measures are not very discriminative. Third, the sample-based classical similarity measures require a calculation that is quadratic in the number of samples, making real-time performance difficult. To deal with these difficulties we propose a new, simple-to-compute and more discriminative similarity measure in spatial-feature spaces. The new similarity measure allows the mean shift algorithm to track more general motion models in an integrated way. To reduce the complexity of the computation to linear order we employ the recently proposed improved fast Gauss transform. This leads to a very efficient and robust nonparametric spatial-feature tracking algorithm. The algorithm is tested on several image sequences and shown to achieve robust and reliable frame-rate tracking.

Many tracking algorithms have difficulties dealing with occlusions and background clutters, and consequently don't converge to an appropriate solution. Tracking based on the mean shift algorithm has shown robust performance in many circumstances but still fails e.g. when encountering dramatic intensity or colour changes in a pre-defined neighbour hood. In this paper, we present a robust tracking algorithm that integrates the advantages of mean shift tracking with those of tracking local invariant features. These features are integrated into the mean shift formulation so that tracking is performed based both on mean shift and feature probability distributions, coupled with an expectation maximisation scheme. Experimental results show robust tracking performance on a series of complicated real image sequences.

In order to solve the problems of motion blur and fast motion, a new robust object tracking algorithm using the Kernelized Correlation Filters (KCF) and the Mean Shift (MS) algorithm, called KCFMS is presented in this paper. The object tracking process can be described as: First, we give the initial position and size of the object and use the Mean Shift algorithm to obtain the position of the object. Second, the Kernelized Correlation Filtering algorithm is used to obtain the position of the object in the same frame. Third, we use the cross update strategy to update the object models. In order to improve the tracking speed as much as possible, our object tracking algorithm works only over one layer. This hybrid algorithm has a good tracking effect on the target fast motion and motion blur. We present extensive experimental results on a number of challenging sequences in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness.

Object detection and tracking under complex environment are challenging because of the disturbances induced by background clutter, illumination changes, occlusions and other factors. The bulk of traditional algorithms basically rely on hand‐crafted features, which are not sufficiently robust to a complex environment. Moreover, the processes of detection and tracking are separated, which leads to the overall efficiency not high. In this study, a novel local probability model (LPM)‐based mean shift (MS) algorithm is proposed to integrate object detection and tracking. The main contributions include: (i) a new framework based on the combination of LPM and MS is established for the integration of object tracking and detection. (ii) For object detection, the training and prediction of LPM are built by stacked denoising autoencoders based deep learning. (iii) For object tracking, an MS tracking algorithm leveraging LPM is modified to improve the tracking efficiency under a complex environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the colour histograms based MS and histograms of oriented gradients based MS in terms of robustness and tracking accuracy.

Robust visual tracking base on adaptively multi-feature fusion and particle filter

In this paper we propose a robust object tracking algorithm using a improved Mean-Shift model. As the traditional Mean-Shift algorithm for object tracking uses a single histogram. Because the traditional Mean-Shift lacks spatial distribution information, so it is difficult to track non-rigid object especially. With a focus on this problem, an improved Mean-Shift algorithm based on the shape feature and color of the target is presented. The results show that the algorithm can track the moving vehicles in real time, and it has a preferable adaptability and robustness to the irregular motion and deformation of the target.

In this paper, we improve the real-time object tracking algorithm of Yang [1] which uses a symmetric similarity function between spatially smoothed kernel-density estimates of the model and the target distributions. This spatial smoothed process applied on the centre points of the probability density functions increases not only computational complexity but also noise sensitivity. After reducing background information and using a new simple similarity function between the model and the target distributions, the proposed algorithm successfully coped with camera motion, partial occlusions and clutter with lower computational complexity. For tracking object, the mean shift algorithm is used iteratively. The simplicity of the new similarity function leads to an efficient and robust nonparametric tracking algorithm. The mathematical results obtained about the performance of the proposed algorithm on several image sequences are represented comparatively in a tabular format.

Object tracking is still an intriguing task as the target undergoes significant appearance changes due to illumination, fast motion, occlusion and shape deformation. Background clutter and numerous other environmental factors are other major constraints which remain a riveting challenge to develop a robust and effective tracking algorithm. In the present study, an adaptive Spatio-temporal context (STC)-based algorithm for online tracking is proposed by combining the context-aware formulation, Kalman filter, and adaptive model learning rate. For the enhancement of seminal STC-based tracking performance, different contributions were made in the proposed study. Firstly, a context-aware formulation was incorporated in the STC framework to make it computationally less expensive while achieving better performance. Afterwards, accurate tracking was made by employing the Kalman filter when the target undergoes occlusion. Finally, an adaptive update scheme was incorporated in the model to make it more robust by coping with the changes of the environment. The state of an object in the tracking process depends on the maximum value of the response map between consecutive frames. Then, Kalman filter prediction can be updated as an object position in the next frame. The average difference between consecutive frames is used to update the target model adaptively. Experimental results on image sequences taken from Template Color (TC)-128, OTB2013, and OTB2015 datasets indicate that the proposed algorithm performs better than various algorithms, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

In this paper, we propose a robust real-time head tracking algorithm using a pan-tilt-zoom camera. In the algorithm, the shape of the head is assumed as an ellipse and a model color histogram is acquired in advance. Then, in the first frame, a user defines the position and scale of a head. In the following frame, we consider the ellipse selected in the previous frame as the initial position, and apply the mean-shift procedure to move the position to the target center where the color histogram similarity to the reference one is maximized. Here, the reference color histogram is adaptively updated from the model color histogram by using the one in the previous frame. Then, by using gradient information, the position and scale of the ellipse are further refined. Large background motion often makes the initial position not converge to the target position. To alleviate this problem, we estimate a reliable initial position by compensating the background motion. Here, to reduce the computational burden of motion estimation, we use the vertical and horizontal 1-D projection dataset. Extensive experiments show that a head is well tracked even when a person moves fast and the scale of the head changes drastically.

In visual tracking, developing an efficient appearance model is a challenging task due to the influence of various factors, such as illumination variation, occlusion, background clutter, and so on. Existing tracking algorithms use appearance samples from previous frames to form a template set upon which target appearance models are built. However, these appearance models are data-dependent, so they may be corrupted by significant appearance variation. It is difficult to update the templates in challenging environments. In this paper, we propose a robust visual tracking algorithm with an adaptive appearance model using a point-to-set metric learning technique. To do this, we first model a target representation using a set of target templates and a regularized affine hull (RAH) spanned by the target templates. Then, we learn a point-to-set distance metric, which is incorporated into the optimization process to obtain an adaptive target representation. The RAH model covers unseen target appearances by affine combinations of the target templates. Based on the proposed target appearance model, we design an effective template update scheme by adjusting the weights of the target templates. Experimental results on challenging video sequences with comparisons to several state-of-the-art tracking algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed tracking algorithm.

Video object segmentation and tracking are two essential building blocks of smart surveillance systems. However, there are several issues that need to be resolved. Threshold decision is a difficult problem for video object segmentation with a multi-background model. In addition, some conditions make robust video object tracking difficult. These conditions include nonrigid object motion, target appearance variations due to changes in illumination, and background clutter. In this paper, a video object segmentation and tracking framework is proposed for smart cameras in visual surveillance networks with two major contributions. First, we propose a robust threshold decision algorithm for video object segmentation with a multi-background model. Second, we propose a video object tracking framework based on a particle filter with the likelihood function composed of diffusion distance for measuring color histogram similarity and motion clue from video object segmentation. The proposed framework can track nonrigid moving objects under drastic changes in illumination and background clutter. Experimental results show that the presented algorithms perform well for several challenging sequences, and our proposed methods are effective for the aforementioned issues.

This paper proposes a robust face tracking algorithm based on the CONDENSATION algorithm that uses skin color and facial shape as observation measures. Two independent trackers are used for robust tracking: one is tracking for the skin colored region and another is tracking for the facial shape region. The two trackers are coupled by using an importance sampling technique, where the skin color density obtained from the skin color tracker is used as the importance function to generate samples for the shape tracker. The samples of the skin color tracker within the chosen shape region are updated with higher weights. The proposed face tracker shows a robust tracking performance over the skin color based tracker or the facial shape based tracker given the presence of clutter background and/or illumination changes.KeywordsSkin ColorColor HistogramFacial ShapeClutter BackgroundFace TrackingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper presents efficient object tracking in video sequences using multiple features by embedding mean shift into particle filters. When clutter background and occlusions are present. Particle filtering is used because it is very robust and performs well for non-linear and non-Gaussian dynamic state estimation problems. The image features, such as shape, texture, color, contours, and random motion appearance can be used to track the moving object(s) in videos. We proposed a smart video surveillance system with real-time as well as offline stored video database for moving object detection, classification and tracking capabilities. The graphical user interface of the proposed system using MATLAB 2012b is implemented that operates on both color and gray scale video images from a stationary camera. In this method, we proposed real time moving object detection and tracking system using static webcam that can processes 800*600, 640*480, and 320*240 resolution video sequences for capturing live scene as well as stored database of segmented videos. Issues related with object detection and tracking is jointly employed using mean shift and particle filters. Tracker will estimate the dynamic shape and random appearance of objects. Tracking requires location and shape of object in every segmented frame. Rectangular bounding box is used to improve the estimate of its shape and appearance. Target object may experience partial occlusions, intersection with other objects with similar color distributions, abrupt motion speed changes, and cluttered background. Test result shows improvement in terms of robustness, tracking drifts, accuracy of tracked bounding box to occlusions.

Nowadays object tracking is a challenge in the fields of computer vision, many algorithms are put forward to overcome the issues such as noisy, colored background, and occlusion of object and also illusion which is low and sudden changes in real-time videos, trackers cannot perform well in real-time environment. An efficient algorithm is needed for effective tracing of an object because of variation in position under various conditions. Here, the MS algorithm is used due to its efficiency and performance. MS tracking algorithm is used to obtain the position of an object by using a Kalman filter, therefore, the performance of tracking an object for different videos is evaluated but it does not improve the target localization. The advanced version is developed for tracking and representing the object in different video sequences are MS and CBWH MS using Kalman filter. Therefore, the proposed method is better than the traditional MS track, which results in the constant tracking of an object throughout the video. It does not get influenced by occlusions and less subjected to background cluttering.

The vision sensor network is expected to achieve a contact-free wide-area location system without any additional burden on users in intelligent environments. In this article, a tracking algorithm for a location system in an intelligent environment is described. A modified color tracker based on a Kalman filter and a mean shift procedure is proposed in order to improve the robustness for occlusion and rapid movement. To handle the sudden change in object movement, we propose a hybrid tracking algorithm, including an adaptive feedback loop, based on the statistics of color histogram models after the mean-shift process. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieves more robust tracking of multiple objects than the conventional method.