Exploiting contextual motion cues for visual object tracking

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for on-line, real-time tracking of arbitrary objects in videos from unconstrained environments. The method is based on a particle filter framework using different visual features and motion prediction models. We effectively integrate a discriminative on-line learning classifier into the model and propose a new method to collect negative training examples for updating the classifier at each video frame. Instead of taking negative examples only from the surroundings of the object region, or from specific distracting objects, our algorithm samples the negatives from a contextual motion density function. We experimentally show that this type of learning improves the overall performance of the tracking algorithm. Finally, we present quantitative and qualitative results on four challenging public datasets that show the robustness of the tracking algorithm with respect to appearance and view changes, lighting variations, partial occlusions as well as object deformations.