Affine hull based target representation for visual tracking

Handling appearance variations is a challenging issue in visual tracking. Existing appearance models are usually built upon a linear combination of templates. With such kind of representation, accurate visual tracking is not desirable when heavy appearance variations are in presence. Under the framework of particle filtering, we propose a novel target representation for tracking. Namely, the target candidates are represented by affine combinations of a template set, which leads to better capability in describing unseen target appearances. Additionally, in order to adapt this representation to dynamic contexts across a video sequence, a novel template update scheme is presented. Different from conventional approaches, the scheme considers both the importance of one template to a target candidate in the current frame and the recentness of the template that is kept in the template set. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves superior performances in comparison with state-of-the-art works. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.