Adaptive Bayesian Object Tracking with Histograms of Dense Local Image Descriptors

Dense local image descriptors like SIFT are fruitful for capturing salient information about image, shown to be successful in various image-related tasks when formed in bag-of-words representation (i.e., histograms). In this paper we consider to utilize these dense local descriptors in the object tracking problem. A notable aspect of our tracker is that instead of adopting a point estimate for the target model, we account for uncertainty in data noise and model incompleteness by maintaining a distribution over plausible candidate models within the Bayesian framework. The target model is also updated adaptively by the principled Bayesian posterior inference, which admits a closed form within our Dirichlet prior modeling. With empirical evaluations on some video datasets, the proposed method is shown to yield more accurate tracking than baseline histogram-based trackers with the same types of features, often being superior to the appearance-based (visual) trackers.