Visual Tracking

Abstract: Visual tracking is a classical computer vision problem with many important applications in areas such as robotics, surveillance and driver assistance. The task is to follow a target in an image sequence. The target can be any object of interest, for example a human, a car or a football. Humans perform accurate visual tracking with little effort, while it remains a difficult computer vision problem. It imposes major challenges, such as appearance changes, occlusions and background clutter. Visual tracking is thus an open research topic, but significant progress has been made in the last few years. The first part of this thesis explores generic tracking, where nothing is known about the target except for its initial location in the sequence. A specific family of generic trackers that exploit the FFT for faster tracking-by-detection is studied. Among these, the CSK tracker have recently shown obtain competitive performance at extraordinary low computational costs. Three contributions are made to this type of trackers. Firstly, a new method for learning the target appearance is proposed and shown to outperform the original method. Secondly, different color descriptors are investigated for the tracking purpose. Evaluations show that the best descriptor greatly improves the tracking performance. Thirdly, an adaptive dimensionality reduction technique is proposed, which adaptively chooses the most important feature combinations to use. This technique significantly reduces the computational cost of the tracking task. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed tracker outperform state-of-the-art methods in literature, while operating at several times higher frame rate. In the second part of this thesis, the proposed generic tracking method is applied to human tracking in surveillance applications. A causal framework is constructed, that automatically detects and tracks humans in the scene. The system fuses information from generic tracking and state-of-the-art object detection in a Bayesian filtering framework. In addition, the system incorporates the identification and tracking of specific human parts to achieve better robustness and performance. Tracking results are demonstrated on a real-world benchmark sequence.