Mean Shift Parallel Tracking on GPU

We propose a parallel Mean Shift (MS) tracking algorithm on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Traditional MS algorithm uses a large number of color histogram, say typically 16x16x16, which makes parallel implementation infeasible. We thus employ K-Means clustering to partition the object color space that enables us to represent color distribution with a quite small number of bins. Based on this compact histogram, all key components of the MS algorithm are mapped onto the GPU. The resultant parallel algorithm consist of six kernel functions, which involves primarily the parallel computation of the candidate histogram and calculation of the Mean Shift vector. Experiments on public available CAVIAR videos show that the proposed parallel tracking algorithm achieves large speedup and has comparable tracking performance, compared with the traditional serial MS tracking algorithm.