Vehicle tracking based on image alignment in aerial videos

Abstract

Ground vehicle tracking is an important component of Aerial Video Surveillance System (AVS). We address the problem of real-time and precise vehicle tracking from a single moving airborne camera which faces the challenges of congestion, occlusion and so on. We track a set of point features of the selected vehicle by the technique of image alignment. An edge featurebased outlier rejection criterion is proposed to eliminate the outlier caused by congestion and occlusion. Large motion and total occlusion is handled by a Kaiman filter. Furthermore, a reappearance verification program is used to ensure the tracker gets back the right object. Experimental results on real aerial videos show the algorithm is reliable and robust. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.