Adaptive Multifeature Tracking in a Particle Filtering Framework

In this paper, we propose a tracking algorithm based on an adaptive multifeature statistical target model. The features are combined in a single particle filter by weighting their contributions using a novel reliability measure derived from the particle distribution in the state space. This measure estimates the reliability of the information by measuring the spatial uncertainty of features. A modified resampling strategy is also devised to account for the needs of the feature reliability estimation. We demonstrate the algorithm using color and orientation features. Color is described with partwise normalized histograms. Orientation is described with histograms of the gradient directions that represent the shape and the internal edges of a target. A feedback from the state estimation is used to align the orientation histograms as well as to adapt the scales of the filters to compute the gradient. Experimental results over a set of real-world sequences show that the proposed feature weighting procedure outperforms state-of-the-art solutions and that the proposed adaptive multifeature tracker improves the reliability of the target estimate while eliminating the need of manually selecting each feature's relevance.