The state-of-the-art in handling occlusions for visual object tracking

Abstract

This paper reports on the trending literature of occlusion handling in the task of online visual tracking. The discussion first explores visual tracking realm and pinpoints the necessity of dedicated attention to the occlusion problem. The findings suggest that although occlusion detection facilitated tracking impressively, it has been largely ignored. The literature further showed that the mainstream of the research is gathered around human tracking and crowd analysis. This is followed by a novel taxonomy of types of occlusion and challenges arising from it, during and after the emergence of an occlusion. The discussion then focuses on an investigation of the approaches to handle the occlusion in the frame-by-frame basis. Literature analysis reveals that researchers examined every aspect of a tracker design that is hypothesized as beneficial in the robust tracking under occlusion. State-of-the-art solutions identified in the literature involved various camera settings, simplifying assumptions, appearance and motion models, target state representations and observation models. The identified clusters are then analyzed and discussed, and their merits and demerits are explained. Finally, areas of potential for future research are presented.