A nonparametric adaptive tracking algorithm based on multiple feature distributions

Abstract

This paper presents an object tracking framework based on the mean-shift algorithm, which is a nonparametric technique that uses statistical color distribution of objects. Tracking objects through highly similar-colored background is one of the problems that need to be addressed. In various cases where object and background color distributions are very similar, the color distribution obtained from single frame alone is not sufficient to track objects reliably. To deal with this problem, the proposed algorithm utilizes an adaptive statistical background and foreground modeling to detect the change due to motion using kernel density estimation techniques based on multiple recent frames. The use of multiple frames supplies more information than single frame and thus it provides more accurate modeling of both background and foreground. In addition to color distribution, this statistical multiple frame-based motion representation is integrated into a modified mean-shift algorithm to create more robust object tracking framework. The use of motion distribution provides additional discriminative power to the framework. The superior performance with quantitative results of the framework has been validated using experiments on synthetic and real sequence of images.