Global Consistency Priors for Joint Part-Based Object Tracking and Image Segmentation

Tracking of previously unseen, articulated objects is an active research area. Recently, Deformable Parts Models (DPMs) have been used to improve the online tracking performance for bounding-box trackers. In this paper, we extend the DPM with global priors which enforce consistency with foreground/background segmentation cues. We propose a Dual Decomposition approach and show how to efficiently solve the high-order coupling constraints as a feasible sub-problem. The proposed approach is evaluated on the VOT online tracking benchmark, outperforming the baseline in both tracking accuracy and robustness. We further show that in presence of stable image segmentation cues, the flexibility of a generic DPM generated from a single reference frame can be improved by introducing the concept of part visibility, the visibility-aware DPM (VDPM). This allows for fine-grained articulated object tracking using an automatically generated DPM from a single template image.