This paper proposes a novel Bayesian online learning and tracking scheme for video objects on Grassmann manifolds. Although manifold visual object tracking is promising, large and fast nonplanar (or out-of-plane) pose changes and long-term partial occlusions of deformable objects in video remain a challenge that limits the tracking performance. The proposed method tackles these problems with the main novelties on: 1) online estimation of object appearances on Grassmann manifolds; 2) optimal criterion-based occlusion handling for online updating of object appearances; 3) a nonlinear dynamic model for both the appearance basis matrix and its velocity; and 4) Bayesian formulations, separately for the tracking process and the online learning process, that are realized by employing two particle filters: one is on the manifold for generating appearance particles and another on the linear space for generating affine box particles. Tracking and online updating are performed in an alternating fashion to mitigate the tracking drift. Experiments using the proposed tracker on videos captured by a single dynamic/static camera have shown robust tracking performance, particularly for scenarios when target objects contain significant nonplanar pose changes and long-term partial occlusions. Comparisons with eight existing state-of-the-art/most relevant manifold/nonmanifold trackers with evaluations have provided further support to the proposed scheme.

This paper addresses online learning of reference object distribution in the context of two hybrid tracking schemes that combine the mean shift with local point feature correspondences, and the mean shift under the Bayesian framework, respectively. The reference object distribution is built up by a kernel-weighted color histogram. The main contributions of the proposed schemes includes: (a) an adaptive learning strategy that seeks to update the reference object distribution when the changes are caused by the intrinsic object dynamic with out partial occlusion/intersection; (b) novel dynamic maintenance of object feature points by exploring both foreground and background sets; (c) integration of adaptive appearance and local point features in joint object appearance similar ity and local point features correspondences-based tracker to improve; (d) integration of adaptive appearance in joint appearance similarity and particle filter tracker under the Bayesian framework to improve. Experimental results on a range of videos captured by a dynamic/stationary cam era demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in terms of robustness to partial occlusions, tracking drifts and tightness and accuracy of tracked bounding box. Comparisons are also made with the two hybrid trackers together with 3 existing trackers.

We propose a novel visual tracking scheme that exploits both the geometrical structure of Grassmann manifold and piece-wise geodesics under a Bayesian framework. Two particle filters are alternatingly employed on the manifold. One is used for online updating the appearance subspace on the manifold using sliding-window observations, and the other is for tracking moving objects on the manifold based on the dynamic shape and appearance models. Main contributions of the paper include: (a) proposing an online manifold learning strategy by a particle filter, where a mixture of dynamic models is used for both the changes of manifold bases in the tangent plane and the piecewise geodesics on the manifold, (b) proposing a manifold object tracker by incorporating object shape in the tangent plane and the manifold prediction error of object appearance jointly in a particle filter framework. Experiments performed on videos containing significant object pose changes show very robust tracking results. The proposed scheme also shows better performance as comparing with three existing trackers in terms of tracking drift and the tightness and accuracy of tracked boxes.

This paper addresses issues in object tracking where videos contain complex scenarios. We propose a novel tracking scheme that jointly employs particle filters and multi-mode anisotropic mean shift. The tracker estimates the dynamic shape and appearance of objects, and also performs online learning of reference object. Several partition prototypes and fully tunable parameters are applied to the rectangular object bounding box for improving the estimates of shape and multiple appearance modes in the object. The main contributions of the proposed scheme include: 1) use a novel approach for online learning of reference object distributions; 2) use a five parameter set (2-D central location, width, height, and orientation) of rectangular bounding box as tunable variables in the joint tracking scheme; 3) derive the multi-mode anisotropic mean shift related to a partitioned rectangular bounding box and several partition prototypes; and 4) relate the bounding box parameter computation with the multi-mode mean shift estimates by combining eigen decomposition, geometry of subareas, and weighted average. This has led to more accurate and efficient tracking where only small number of particles (<;20) is required. Experiments have been conducted for a range of videos captured by a dynamic or stationary camera, where the target object may experience long-term partial occlusions, intersections with other objects with similar color distributions, deformable object accompanied with shape, pose or abrupt motion speed changes, and cluttered background. Comparisons with existing methods and performance evaluations are also performed. Test results have shown marked improvement of the proposed method in terms of robustness to occlusions, tracking drifts and tightness and accuracy of tracked bounding box. Limitations of the method are also mentioned.

A novel visual object tracking scheme is proposed by using joint point feature correspondences and object appearance similarity. For point feature-based tracking, we propose a candidate tracker that simultaneously exploits two separate sets of point feature correspondences in the foreground and in the surrounding background, where background features are exploited for the indication of occlusions. Feature points in these two sets are then dynamically maintained. For object appearance-based tracking, we propose a candidate tracker based on an enhanced anisotropic mean shift with a fully tunable (five degrees of freedom) bounding box that is partially guided by the above feature point tracker. Both candidate trackers contain a reinitialization process to reset the tracker in order to prevent accumulated tracking error propagation in frames. In addition, a novel online learning method is introduced to the enhanced mean shift-based candidate tracker. The reference object distribution is updated in each time interval if there is an indication of stable and reliable tracking without background interferences. By dynamically updating the reference object model, tracking is further improved by using a more accurate object appearance similarity measure. An optimal selection criterion is applied to the final tracker based on the results of these candidate trackers. Experiments have been conducted on several videos containing a range of complex scenarios. To evaluate the performance, the proposed scheme is further evaluated using three objective criteria, and compared with two existing trackers. All our results have shown that the proposed scheme is very robust and has yielded a marked improvement in terms of tracking drift, tightness, and accuracy of tracked bounding boxes, especially for complex video scenarios containing long-term partial occlusions or intersections, deformation, or background clutter with similar color distributions to the foreground object.

We propose a novel scheme that jointly employs anisotropic mean shift and particle filters for tracking moving objects from video. The proposed anisotropic mean shift, that is applied to partitioned areas in a candidate object bounding box whose parameters (center, width, height and orientation) are adjusted during the mean shift iterations, seeks multiple local modes in spatial-kernel weighted color histograms. By using a Gaussian distributed Bhattacharyya distance as the likelihood and mean shift updated parameters as the state vector, particle filters become more efficient in terms of tracking using a small number of particles (<20). The combined scheme is able to maintain the merits of both methods. Experiments conducted on videos containing deformable objects with long-term partial occlusions and intersections have shown robust tracking performance. Comparisons with two existing methods have been made which showed marked improvement in terms of robustness to occlusions, tightness and accuracy of tracked box, and tracking drift.

We propose a novel tracking scheme that jointly employs point feature correspondences and object appearance similarity. For selecting point correspondences, we use a subset of scaleinvariant point features from SIFT that agree with a pre-defined affine transformation. The selected consensus points are then used for pre-selecting candidate regions. For appearance similarity based tracking, we employ an existing anisotropic mean shift, from which the formula for estimating bounding box parameters (width, height, orientation and center) are derived. A switching criterion is utilized to handle the situation where only a small number of point correspondences is found. Experiments and evaluation are performed on tracking moving objects on videos where objects may contain partial occlusions, intersection, deformation and pose changes among other transforms. Our comparisons with two existing methods have shown that the proposed scheme has yielded marked improvement, especially in terms of reducing tracking drifts, of robustness to occlusions, and of tightness and accuracy of tracked bounding box.

This paper addresses issues on moving object tracking from videos. We propose a novel tracking scheme that jointly exploits local object features using consensus point correspondences, and global object appearance and shape models using adaptive particle filter-based eigen-tracking. The paper include the following main novelties: (a) employ consensus feature point correspondences to estimate the motion vector of shape model; (b) employ adaptive particle filters and motion corrected state vector for joint appearance- and shape-based eigen-tracking. An adaptive number of particles is chosen automatically based on an updated estimation of covariance matrix. Further, online learning is made adaptive to avoid learning using partially-occluded objects. The proposed scheme is realized by integrating SURF and RANSAC for estimating consensus point correspondences, and modify an existing particle filter-based eigen-tracking . Experiment results on tracking moving objects in videos have shown that the proposed scheme provides more accurate tracking, especially for objects with fast motion or long-term partial occlusions. The average number of particles is significantly reduced. Comparisons have been made with an existing method, results have shown that the proposed scheme has provided an improved tracking accuracy at the cost of more computations.