Occlusion Handling in Object Detection

Object tracking is a process that follows an object through consecutive frames of images to determine the object’s movement relative other objects of those frames. In other words, tracking is the problem of estimating the trajectory of an object in the image plane as it moves around a scene. This chapter presents research that deals with the problem of tracking objects when they are occluded. An object can be partially or fully occluded. Depending on the tracking domain, a tracker can deal with partial and full object occlusions using features such as colour and texture. But sometimes it fails to detect the objects after occlusion. The shape feature of an individual object can provide additional information while combined with colour and texture features. It has been observed that with the same colour and texture if two object’s shape information is taken then these two objects can be detected after the occlusion has occurred. From this observation, a new and a very simple algorithm is presented in this chapter, which is able to track objects after occlusion even if the colour and textures are the same. Some experimental results are shown along with several case studies to compare the effectiveness of the shape features against colour and texture features.