Occlusion-Aware Real-Time Object Tracking

The online learning methods are popular for visual tracking because of their robust performance for most video sequences. However, the drifting problem caused by noisy updates is still a challenge for most highly adaptive online classifiers. In visual tracking, target object appearance variation, such as deformation and long-term occlusion, easily causes noisy updates. To overcome this problem, a new real-time occlusion-aware visual tracking algorithm is introduced. First, we learn a novel two-stage classifier with circulant structure with kernel, named integrated circulant structure kernels (ICSK). The first stage is applied for transition estimation and the second is used for scale estimation. The circulant structure makes our algorithm realize fast learning and detection. Then, the ICSK is used to detect the target without occlusion and build a classifier pool to save these classifiers with noisy updates. When the target is in heavy occlusion or after long-term occlusion, we redetect it using an optimal classifier selected from the classifier-pool according to an entropy minimization criterion. Extensive experimental results on the full benchmark demonstrate our real-time algorithm achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods.