Dynamic appearance model for particle filter based visual tracking

This paper made major research on the target representation problem, which plays a significant role in visual tracking, but has received little attention in most researches. In order to fulfill the requirements of tracking robustness and effectiveness in practical conditions, a dynamic appearance model is constructed. Due to particle filter's excellent characteristics, it is employed in this paper not only to estimate target's state, but also to construct the dynamic observation model integrated by multiple cues. In the proposed method, a dynamic multi-cue integration model is constructed for particle filter framework. And a systematic study is done on evaluating cue's weight. Specially, a particle filter based weight tracker is designed to update multi-cue's integrating manner online, so as to adapt the observation model to target's appearance changes. In such a way, a double-particle-filter based tracking framework is formed, and it is field tested on a variety of videos in different tracking conditions. In the experiments and comparisons, the applicable conditions of the proposed dynamic model are discussed, and its robustness and effectiveness are demonstrated. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.