Visual distracters are detrimental and generally very difficult to handle in target tracking, because they generate false positive candidates for target matching. The resilience of region-based matching to the distracters depends not only on the matching metric, but also on the characteristics of the target region to be matched. The two tasks, i.e., learning the best metric and selecting the distracter-resilient target regions, actually correspond to the attribute selection and spatial selection processes in the human visual perception. This paper presents an initial attempt to unify the modeling of these two tasks for an effective solution, based on the introduction of a new quantity called Soft Visual Margin. As a function of both matching metric and spatial location, it measures the discrimination between the target and its spatial distracters, and characterizes the reliability of matching. Different from other formulations of margin, this new quantity is analytical and is insensitive to noisy data. This paper presents a novel method to jointly determine the best spatial location and the optimal metric. Based on that, a solid distracter-resilient region tracker is designed, and its effectiveness is validated and demonstrated through extensive experiments.

Matching visual appearances of the target over consecutive video frames is a fundamental yet challenging task in visual tracking. Its performance largely depends on the distance metric that determines the quality of visual matching. Rather than using fixed and predefined metric, recent attempts of integrating metric learning-based trackers have shown more robust and promising results, as the learned metric can be more discriminative. In general, these global metric adjustment methods are computationally demanding in real-time visual tracking tasks, and they tend to underfit the data when the target exhibits dynamic appearance variation. This paper presents a nonparametric data-driven local metric adjustment method. The proposed method finds a spatially adaptive metric that exhibits different properties at different locations in the feature space, due to the differences of the data distribution in a local neighborhood. It minimizes the deviation of the empirical misclassification probability to obtain the optimal metric such that the asymptotic error as if using an infinite set of training samples can be approximated. Moreover, by taking the data local distribution into consideration, it is spatially adaptive. Integrating this new local metric learning method into target tracking leads to efficient and robust tracking performance. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed tracking method in various tracking scenarios.

Recent attempts of integrating metric learning in visual tracking have produced encouraging results. Instead of using fixed and pre-specified metric in visual appearance matching, these methods are able to learn and adjust the metric adaptively by finding the best projection of the feature space. Such learned metric is by design the best to discriminate the target of interest and its distracters from the background. However, an important issue remained unaddressed is how we can determine the optimal dimensionality of the projection to achieve best discrimination. Using inappropriate dimensions for the projection is likely to result in larger classification error, or higher computational costs and over-fitting. This paper presents a novel solution to this structural order determination problem, by introducing sparsity regularization for metric learning (or SRML). This regularization leads to the lowest possible dimensionality of the projection and thus determining the best order. This can actually be viewed as the minimum description length regularization in metric learning. The experiments validate this new approach on standard benchmark datasets, and demonstrate its effectiveness in visual tracking applications.

Tracking low-resolution (LR) targets is a practical yet quite challenging problem in real video analysis applications. Lack of discriminative details in the visual appearance of the LR target leads to the matching ambiguity, which confronts most existing tracking methods. Although artificially enhancing the video resolution by superresolution (SR) techniques before analyzing might be an option, the high demand of computational cost can hardly meet the requirements of the tracking scenario. This paper presents a novel solution to track LR targets without explicitly performing SR. This new approach is based on discriminative metric preservation that preserves the data affinity structure in the high-resolution (HR) feature space for effective and efficient matching of LR images. In addition, we substantialize this new approach in a solid case study of differential tracking under metric preservation and derive a closed-form solution to motion estimation for LR video. In addition, this paper extends the basic linear metric preservation method to a more powerful nonlinear kernel metric preservation method. Such a solution to LR target tracking is discriminative, robust, and efficient. Extensive experiments validate the entrustments and effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method in tracking LR targets.

Tracking low resolution (LR) targets is a practical yet quite challenging problem in real applications. The loss of discriminative details in the visual appearance of the L-R targets confronts most existing visual tracking methods. Although the resolution of the LR video inputs may be enhanced by super resolution (SR) techniques, the large computational cost for high-quality SR does not make it an attractive option. This paper presents a novel solution to track LR targets without performing explicit SR. This new approach is based on discriminative metric preservation that preserves the structure in the high resolution feature space for LR matching. In addition, we integrate metric preservation with differential tracking to derive a closed-form solution to motion estimation for LR video. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Matching the visual appearances of the target over consecutive image frames is the most critical issue in video-based object tracking. Choosing an appropriate distance metric for matching determines its accuracy and robustness, and significantly influences the tracking performance. This paper presents a new tracking approach that incorporates adaptive metric into differential tracking method. This new approach automatically learns an optimal distance metric for more accurate matching, and obtains a closed-form analytical solution to motion estimation and differential tracking. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of adaptive metric, and demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed new tracking method.

Matching the visual appearances of the target over consecutive image frames is the most critical issue in video-based object tracking. Choosing an appropriate distance metric for matching determines its accuracy and robustness, and thus significantly influences the tracking performance. Most existing tracking methods employ fixed pre-specified distance metrics. However, this simple treatment is problematic and limited in practice, because a pre-specified metric does not likely to guarantee the closest match to be the true target of interest. This paper presents a new tracking approach that incorporates adaptive metric learning into the framework of visual object tracking. Collecting a set of supervised training samples on-the-fly in the observed video, this new approach automatically learns the optimal distance metric for more accurate matching. The design of the learned metric ensures that the closest match is very likely to be the true target of interest based on the supervised training. Such a learned metric is discriminative and adaptive. This paper substantializes this new approach in a solid case study of adaptive-metric differential tracking, and obtains a closed-form analytical solution to motion estimation and visual tracking. Moreover, this paper extends the basic linear distance metric learning method to a more powerful nonlinear kernel metric learning method. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed new tracking method.

Vision-based animal behavior analysis is a critical and interesting problem for both biologists and computer vision scientists. In this paper, an automatic system for detecting behaviors of fruit flies is presented. Firstly, we propose an ellipse model to fit the contours of fruit flies, which efficiently detects fruit flies in a single frame. Then we associate the detection results together to form the trajectories. An AdaBoost classifier is used to analyze special behaviors of flies. The experiments show that our system can robustly track fruit flies and detect the fly behaviors with high recall rate in real time. This system has been adopted to aid biologists for research purposes.